Best Practices for Pavement Edge Maintenance

INTRODUCTION The Research Problem This research addresses the problem of pavement edge drop-offs as a maintenance, safety and liability issue for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). With impact to TxDOTs entire roadway system including more than 41,000 centerline miles of Farm-to-Market (FM) highways and millions of dollars in annual maintenance funds, the edge maintenance issue warrants that best practices for pavement edge maintenance be defined and implemented. Multiple perspectives exist on the pavement edge drop-off problem and include construction, design, maintenance, and legal views, among others. Of these, the legal and liability concerns seem to get an inordinate amount of press and discuss topics such as defining pavement edge drop-off severity from a tort liability perspective and establishing threshold pavement edge maintenance standards and requirements. Maintenance and construction publications discuss methods, procedures, equipment and materials for repairing edge drop-offs in varying degrees of detail, both as maintenance activities and as part of pavement reconstruction projects. One of the challenges of this research has been to explore this many faceted problem but not lose sight of the overall project objective, which has been to define and implement best practices for repair and stabilization of pavement edges. This is clearly a maintenance concern, and while we acknowledge that other perspectives such as the design, construction, and legal must be taken into account, we have intentionally focused our research from the maintenance perspective. Research Objectives TxDOT personnel currently use various methods, materials, and equipment to repair roadway edges, but this type of maintenance has typically been done using local (district) forces without the benefit of a broader view of the problem. Although localized perspectives combined with talented and innovative maintenance supervisors have achieved highly-developed insights and repair procedures within a given district, this has also led to a perpetuation of the way weve always done it method, a situation that we have attempted to improve by helping those personnel involved in TxDOTs day-to-day maintenance activities become aware of alternatives. We view the best practices approach to pavement edge maintenance as a means to take what is best from local practices both within Texas and from across the nation, and share this information with all TxDOT districts, thereby strengthening TxDOTs entire pavement edge maintenance repair program. Thus the primary benefit of this research has been a consolidation of institutional knowledge regarding edge repair techniques and the dissemination of those best practices across the State of Texas. Stated simply, our research objectives have been (1) to define the most effective and efficient practices for repairing and stabilizing edge failures and (2) to communicate these best practices through practical, clear, and effective training to TxDOT maintenance forces.

Download link: Best Practices for Pavement Edge Maintenance