ABSTRACT
Repair and maintenance now account for more than 50% of the construction industry’s turnover, yet very little data are available on which to base predictions of future costs. Local authorities with large building stocks have therefore considerable difficulty in justifying maintenance budgets. Nowhere is this more true than in the roads and bridges departments. In many cases historical records are incomplete or non-existent, especially before local government reorganisation. Even when records do exist they are not consistently structured. The inability to quantify maintenance and repair costs, however, has further ramifications. First, it makes the prediction of total life cycle costs impossible. Thus investment decisions are based solely on the criterion of initial capital cost, a particularly dangerous practice when the authorities responsible for capital and recurrent costs may not be one and the same party. Second, there is no rational basis on which to choose between replacing and repairing a road or bridge.
