Estimation of annual repair expenditure for interstate highway bridges

What is it about?

State-level bridge expenditure forecasts are used by highway agencies for financial need forecasts, long-term planning and budgeting, asset valuation, and infrastructure user cost allocation. It has been observed that the levels of normalized bridge expenditure vary widely across the states and across time periods, and therefore it may be inappropriate to use an average value of normalized expenditure for agencies business processes. Further, there is a need to investigate the underlying causes of this variation so that bridge managers can better estimate their expected costs. In throwing more light on this issue, this paper shows how aggregate (jurisdiction-level) bridge data can be used to develop annual maintenance/repair expenditure (AMEX) models. In the case study of the paper, data from US states were used, and the AMEX was expressed as a function of bridge condition, bridge inventory size, traffic loading, and climate severity. The data spanned the period 2003–2012.

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