Quantifying Disproportionate User Costs Caused by Pavement Conditions

Pavement conditions are often linked to safety outcomes, greenhouse gas emissions, and a region’s economic development. While a pavement management program aims to improve overall network conditions over time, recent research shows that the burden of poor condition pavements falls proportionally on certain corridors or regions within the network. Moreover, recent studies have highlighted the lack of standardized performance measures for evaluating disproportional impacts among road users. For these reasons, this paper proposes new metrics to quantify the monetary impacts on road users, aiming to better understand the impacts. We compared the existing federal measures with the new metrics proposed to quantify the economic impact of pavement conditions on road users, followed by a detailed discussion of the proposed new set of performance measures. The effectiveness of these measures was demonstrated using New Mexico as a case study, a state with a 50.2% Hispanic population and 18.4% of residents living in poverty. The methodology was designed to be replicable using public data available to state departments of transportation. The new performance measures provide additional perspectives beyond those offered by federal pavement condition percentages. In summary, this paper demonstrates that the proposed measures help identify pavement condition disparities that could impact areas disproportionally and can help state departments of transportation assess the need for targeted, localized approaches to budget allocations and infrastructure investment.