Motorists’ Evaluation of Road Maintenance Management

The road network is extremely valuable. Road Administrations are expected to invest maintenance funding in a way that returns maximum benefit to road users. Cost-benefit analysis is one method to ensure that an adequate return in terms of benefits results from committing expenditure. Today, cost-benefit calculations are frequently used as a base for decision making of investments. The surges for such methods in the maintenance management sector are increasing. Up to the present, one reason for not analysing costs and benefits for various maintenance management measures has been the lack of knowledge about comfort benefits for road users in quantitative monetary terms. The aim with this thesis is to investigate motorists’ apprehension of pavement maintenance management and winter maintenance operations. The final goal is to find out their willingness to pay for different levels of road maintenance management. Those values can later be used in cost-benefit calculations and also in effect models of road maintenance management. Due to the pioneer status of this study, focus groups and in-depth interviews as well as a number of pilot studies have been carried out before a main survey with stated choice experiments could be designed. These exploratory studies showed that the interviewees were familiar with the types of road surface damage that exist and in many cases mastered the same terminology as the Road Administration and others. Showing pictures of well-known types of road damage lead to higher monetary valuations of getting better road standard in comparison with just text descriptions. One reason for that could be the requisite severness of the damage in order to illustrate a certain road maintenance shortage. The respondents with the text descriptions could have stated their preferences for an, in their own minds, average shortcoming while the group with access to photograph of road damage all saw the same severe damage. Illustrations of different road maintenance standards make it possible to control the respondents interpretation of the maintenance management standard valuated but could lead to high monetary estimations. Driving comfort was very important to the interviewees in the exploratory studies. That was manifested in the pilot stated choice surveys, which resulted in high willingness to pay for better pavement management. The main study consisted of two surveys; the first one was about pavement maintenance management and was carried out in October to November 2000 and the second one took place in February to March 2001 and was about winter maintenance operations. Both the pavement and the winter survey included attitude questions and two stated choice experiments. The result showed that the maintenance management status of the road network was important to car users. For example, the worst pavement damage was roughness; the motorists were willing to pay 1.7 SEK (Swedish Crowns) per kilometre to avoid roads damaged in their full length. The least harmful damage of those studied was cracks; the willingness to pay to avoid that was 0.5 SEK per kilometre. For more rapid snow clearance, the car users were willing to pay 60 to 80 SEK per year for getting the roads cleared from snow one hour earlier than the current standard implies. The willingness to pay for driving on bare roads in comparison with snow roads was 0.4 SEK per kilometre. Statistical tests on the models showed that the parameter values were well estimated In the pavement as well as in the winter survey, a cluster group analysis was performed in order to test the heterogeneity of attitudes and behaviour to road maintenance management. The analysis resulted in two separate groups in each survey. One group consisted of drivers who reported to be very influenced by the level of maintenance management regarding chosen speed, joy of driving and so on. The other group reported to be less influenced and had lower acceptance of higher road tax for the purpose to increase the maintenance management standard. Separate stated choice models revealed that the differences in attitudes could also reflect the respondents’ willingness to pay for higher road maintenance standard. However, the differences were only small and the different groups’ monetary valuations were not found to be significantly different from each other. The result of this study, better knowledge about motorists’ apprehension of maintenance management, their attitudes to driving comfort and road standard and their monetary valuations of different levels of pavement maintenance and winter maintenance operations, opens up the possibility to make cost-benefit analysis of various maintenance management projects. The impact of the monetary values found in this study has been studied in a limited cost-benefit analysis. Descriptors: stated choice, stated preference, valuations of maintenance management, driving comfort, road standard evaluation