ABSTRACT
The United States has nearly 4 million miles of highways and streets and more than 550,000 bridges of at least a 20-ft span. Constituting the largest government-owned asset in the country, highways are associated with annual investment levels exceeding $1 trillion [FHWA and AASHTO, 1996]. Transportation agencies at all levels of government have the responsibility of effectively managing the performance and usage of their physical assets so that such assets can be kept in acceptable condition to provide desirable levels of service with available resources. Given the ever-increasing commercial and personal travel demands vis-à-vis limited resources, this task is more critical than ever before. Management of highways has come of age because of changes in the transportation environment, changes in public expectations, and extraordinary advances in technology. Defined as a systematic process of maintaining, upgrading, and operating physical assets cost-effectively [FHWA, 1999], highway asset management combines engineering principles with sound business practices and economic theory and provides a tool to facilitate a more organized, logical, and integrated approach to decision making. The recent issuance of Governmental Accounting Standards Board Statement 34 (GASB34) established new financial reporting requirements for state and local governments to ensure safekeeping and appropriate use of public resources and operational accountability [GASB, 1999]. GASB34 therefore helped usher in a new era in highway asset management. While most state and local highway asset management systems are in their nascent stages of development, the various component management systems that will ultimately constitute an overall highway management system are fairly well developed in most states. These include pavement, bridge, maintenance, traffic, and safety management systems. A discussion of the three dimensions
(physical facilities, operational functions, and system objectives) that are associated with the various management systems is presented in this chapter.
