A Quest for Successful Pavements in Texas

Building successful pavements requires understanding the factors that contribute to making a pavement succeed. The first question to ask is what a successful pavement is. To answer this question and gather information from successful pavement sections, a two-year project was conducted by the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). Information about flexible pavements identified as superior performers has been collected and stored in a database with a user-friendly web-based interface. This database will be used to effectively learn from prior successes. Lessons learned in the past through experience will contribute to better understanding the factors that make a pavement succeed. The aim is to help practitioners improve technical specifications and testing techniques, which will in turn result in more consistent construction of premium pavements. This paper describes the methodology to identify a pavement as successful and briefly describes the Texas Successful Flexible Pavements Web Site.