Globalization of Pavement Technology - The Promises and Challenges

摘要

Pavement technology has made tremendous advances, and is being made widely accessible and available through the pooling of knowledge, modern communications and training. The challenge lies in implementing its full potential in the local context. In the conceptual objective, there is a shift from asset creation and what builders want to a service-oriented approach and what users want. In pavement technology, the choice of pavement type tends to be dominated more by local tradition and industry preference than technical or economic factors, and the construction method by labor considerations. The criteria by which decisions are made tend to have emphasized costs and inputs with little evaluation of the economic benefits which allow a comparison between short- and long-term objectives. Technology options are constrained by local industry capacity, procurement policies and quality. The institutional environment shapes the incentives for innovation, the adoption of management technologies and the integrity of decision-making. Realizing technology's potential thus requires institutional reforms that improve business processes, measures to strengthen the local market and industry, the identification of appropriate technologies through a greatly expanded knowledge base, a focus on optimizing both user benefits and input costs, and improvements to the integrity of management information.