Evaluation of Optimized Pavement Maintenance for User Costs and Vehicle Emissions on the Indian Urban Roads

The transportation sector is a major source of environmental air pollution, contributing 25% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally. Among India’s transport sector, the road sector alone is responsible for 80%–90% of total GHG emissions. Besides emissions from construction and maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) activities of road infrastructure and vehicular tailpipe emissions (TPEs) are responsible for about 80%–90% of total emissions in case of an urban environment. TPEs are directly correlated to vehicular fuel consumption (FC), and hence, influenced by the pavement performance and application of different maintenance strategies. This paper presents the development of a road asset management system (RAMS) to manage urban roads in India sustainably. The developed framework implements Highway Development and Management (HDM‐4) software to study the urban road network under condition‐based maintenance scenario in three aspects: technical (pavement performance), economic and environmental (emissions estimation). Three additional scenarios were defined to analyse the effectiveness of maintenance strategies: do nothing (DN), routine and scheduled‐based. This study was conducted on urban roads of Pune Smart City over a network of 116.16 km in length, consisting of both bituminous (BT) and cement concrete (CC) pavements. The case study results showed that condition‐based is the most economical scenario and estimates the maximum reduction in emissions. Over Indian Rupees (INR) 285.76 million of funds and 6028.73 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) can be saved in 10 years by opting for a condition‐based over scheduled‐based scenario. The decline in GHG emissions was even more significant compared to other scenarios.