Benefit-Cost Assessment of Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) in Highway Maintenance

AVL has been used extensively in public transit, law enforcement, and EMS applications (among others), and is garnering more and more interest with the highway maintenance community. Sponsored by the Kansas DOT, The University of Kansas conducted a study of the use of AVL for highway maintenance activities, especially snow removal. State DOTs and other transportation agencies were surveyed with respect to their use or potential use of AVL. At the time of the survey, only 8 states had deployed AVL, in addition to several municipalities and one Canadian province. None of the surveyed agencies had conducted quantitative assessments of the benefits of system deployment. Qualitative and perceived benefits taken from the aggregated survey data were used to develop estimates of benefits likely to be realized from an AVL deployment. Savings from improved fleet management, paperwork reductions, and reductions in snow-related crashes were compared with the system investment and maintenance costs. Costs for system wide deployment were estimated to be about $9,000,000 with about $800,000 needed for maintenance annually. Benefit/cost ratios were calculated for three deployment schedules based on conservative assumptions and then based on moderate assumptions. The analysis estimated B/C ratios would be at least 2.6 and probably closer to 25. This paper elaborates on the results of the survey and details the methodology used in the analysis.