ABSTRACT
The Austrian State road network is in a rather poor condition due to the lack of budgets for structural maintenance for many years. Recent studies have shown that an increase of the existing budget of 80% is necessary to avoid progressive deterioration. To support the efforts to increase the maintenance budgets an additional study for pavements was conducted to assess the effect of postponing maintenance on the later maintenance needs. A clear relation was found between the duration of the do-nothing-period and the additional investments to compensate the deterioration of the pavement and the reduction of the asset value occurred in the meantime. These additional budgetary needs range between 25% after a do-nothing-period of 5 years and 150% after 9 years. Thus for the first time based on LCC-calculations it could be shown that periodic condition related maintenance has an economic advantage against do-nothing-strategies with subsequent improvement.
