Evaluating the Impact of Pavement Preservation Surface Treatments on National Park Service Roadways

摘要

The Federal Lands Highway Division (FLHD) has actively been involved in the use of pavementpreservation strategies to maintain National Park Service (NPS) roadways. This practice datesback several decades, and has increased substantially in recent years. As an example, in 2007the agency spent around $9 million on pavement preservation; this increased to approximately$21 million in 2009 and $29 million in 2010.In late 2010 the FLHD initiated a study to develop pavement performance models for the NPS’pavement management system (PMS) that address the application of surface treatmentscommonly used by FLHD. Those treatments include chip seals, slurry seals, micro-surfacing,and thin HMA overlays. This paper discusses the issues that were encountered in addressing theproject’s objectives, including issues associated with data collection, modeling to predictpavement performance, and calculating the performance benefits obtained from the applicationof surface treatments in terms of pavement service life extensions. In the end, performancejumps and projected life extensions of single course chip seals under specific conditions wereestimated. Many recommendations were also developed to improve the FLHD’s ability tomonitor and model surface treatment performance.