ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT Life cycle cost is defined as the sum of initial costs, construction costs, maintenance costs, rehabilitation costs, and demolition costs. This is the total direct cost of building a bridge from beginning to end until it has been removed from the site. It is a direct cost in that it does not include costs that incurred indirectly by the bridge. The costs included in the above definition are all monetary costs. Missing in the definition are two major, non-monetary items: social costs and environmental costs. These may be considered two major costs as compared to other costs. Thus, a project with the least life cycle costs as defined above could actually be more expensive than a project that has less of an impact on society and the environment. We will discuss this in this article.
