| Many of the paved roads in service in the United States are at the end of their expected service lives. These pavements need funds for major improvements to keep them in a safe and serviceable condition. The increasing funds required for maintaining the pavements and the dwindling size of available funds require a well organized and effective management system.; A strategic level asset management approach would provide a better way of communicating the multidisciplinary personnel involved in managing a local agency's assets. The Governmental Accounting Standards Board's new standards, GASB 34, requires agencies to report their assets by using an asset management system or an accrual-based accounting method. The standard reporting requirements are expected to provide better accountability of the agencies to the tax-paying people.; The main focus of this research was to adapt an effective asset management approach for managing a pavement network, incorporating more efficient tools than those currently used in the traditional pavement management process. Some recommendations, additions, or modifications of the local agency pavement management system software, MTC-PMS, were planned to better support asset management concepts and to better comply with GASB 34 requirements.; The study provides a conceptual description of pavement management, asset management, GASB 34 reporting requirements, and asset valuation. With a description of existing methods in pavement management systems, it also provides recommended methods to be used for an asset management approach for managing a pavement network. The concepts were evaluated by analyzing a typical local agency pavement network database. The approach considered the reporting of pavement inventory, condition, life, value, and impacts of funding/management strategies to the funding authorities. The evaluation included the impacts of strategies on several performance measures including asset value, condition, remaining life, and some other economic factors/ratios. Finally, the outcome of the applied approach was justified as useful to the managing agencies by collecting feedback from the users of a local agency pavement management system.; The approach used in the study provides useful information for the annual reporting of a pavement network to a funding authority. The reporting gives important information supporting asset management and GASB 34 requirements. |
