Evaluation of Two Pavement Rehabilitation Techniques for Municipal Roads

State and local Departments of Transportation, who have primary responsibility for the upkeep of their roadway pavement, must do so under tight budgets. At the expense of lower functioning roads (such as urban and rural collectors), these agencies tend to focus more of their maintenance and operations budget on high-volume roads - such as freeways and multilane highways - due to their importance. However, municipal officials responsible for the maintenance of collector roads are still expected to provide pavements of acceptable quality to the public, but they must do so under even tighter budgets. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of two pavement maintenance and rehabilitation techniques for municipal roads. One is the mill-and-overlay method, and the other is a resurfacing technique called NovaLite. The HDM-4 pavement management software was used to perform the analysis on 5^th Street in downtown Chattanooga, which is under the jurisdiction of the City of Chattanooga Public Works Department, a municipal agency. The results of the analysis indicate that NovaLite is superior to mill-and-over lay in initial cost, time and ease of construction, and extent of disruption of traffic. Even when lifecycle costs are considered, the analysis also shows that NovaLite maintains its advantages in cost and effectiveness, suggesting a way forward for cash-strapped municipalities.