World-Class Winter Services and Management

摘要

The Swedish Road Administration (now known as the Swedish Transport Administration)endeavored to benchmark winter services and management in order to improve themaintenance of winter services and pavements. Eight countries/states that include Norway,Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Scotland, Slovenia, Minnesota Department of Transportation(MnDOT) in USA, and Alberta, Canada were included in the survey. In Sweden, customersatisfaction surveys for winter services indicated lower than desirable results. Therefore,the objective of the international survey would allow comparison and determination ofinnovative maintenance and management practices from world class countries. This studywould benchmark winter services, and outsourcing issues, and management practices incold climate countries.This international survey used a comprehensive custom-made questionnaire approach,which was followed-up by country interviews in the participating cold climate countries.The study was carried out by a team from Aalto University in Finland and took place fromOctober 2009 to June 2010. A final workshop was held to allow countries to present theirbest practices and engage in a brainstorming workshop to solicit challenges, innovativeideas, and possible continuation.It is important to understand how different countries approach management, qualitypractices and customer services to provide them, the road users, withsatisfactory/reasonable road condition during the winter time. The results from the studycould be used by all participating countries to change or re-engineer their own roadmanagement practices. The results indicate that winter services are very difficult tocompare both nationally and internationally as weather, road type, different maintenancestandards, different survey methods and questionnaires, outsourced or in-housemaintenance, and different practices are all present. However, the results demonstratethat similar issues were encountered in the participating countries. Benchmarking othercountries practices revealed that existing practices can be improved and in spite ofdifferences, it can be fruitful to benchmark road management practices.