What is the Need?

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), through its Division of Research, Innovation, and System Information (DRISI), completed research conducted by the Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology (AHMCT) Research Center at UC Davis. This research revealed that maintenance work on guardrails, barriers, and end-treatments has the highest average cost per work order compared to the maintenance cost of all other roadside features considered. This finding highlighted the need to evaluate these costs to improve efficiency. Additionally, in certain situations, such operations expose highway workers to live traffic for an extended duration, increasing safety risks. The equipments’ exposure to high-speed traffic and the potential for crashes and equipment downtime decrease productivity and increase maintenance/construction costs. Therefore, there was a need for both safety and efficiency considerations in developing a lifecycle cost analysis and cost-benefit evaluation, which could assist decision-making regarding best practices to reduce both safety risks and the cost of such operations.

What are We Doing?

The AHMCT Research Center employed a Project Panel (panel), including the Caltrans Project Manager (PM), Caltrans project customers, and other stakeholders to guide this research. Data from the Integrated Maintenance Management System (IMMS) were integrated with data from best practices of other state Departments of Transportation (DOTs), along with data obtained from Caltrans Districts and field operational personnel, to establish the baseline necessary for performing the cost-benefit analysis.

What is our Goal?

The purpose of the current research was to compute and compare the lifecycle costs of concrete barriers vs. steel guardrails, as well as wooden vs. steel guardrail posts and signposts. Another objective of the study was to develop a software tool that could calculate and compare the lifetime costs of these barriers, taking into account their construction, maintenance, and public costs, as well as the risks associated with exposure of the workers to live traffic during maintenance activities.

What is the Benefit?

The benefits of this project include improved safety for maintenance/construction workers and cost savings in certain high-cost maintenance operations associated with barriers, guardrails, and signposts. This research may assist in the decision-making process when:

•  Choosing between concrete versus metal guardrails.
• Replacing wooden versus metal guardrail posts and signposts.

AHMCT was able to develop a software, CalBarrier.  Users can download here.