Comprehensive Evaluation of Virginia Department of Transportation’s Experience with its First Performance-Based Road-Maintenance Contract

The Virginia Department of Transportation’s (VDOT) first performance-based road-maintenance contract was concluded in July 2007. This contract required the contractor to maintain all assets and carry out incident management and snow and ice removal services on a total of 250 mi (402 km) of a number of Virginia’s interstate highways. This contract acted as a pilot project for VDOT and other states departments of transportation (DOT). Since performance-based road-maintenance contracting is rather new and yet to be utilized by many state DOTs, there is an emerging need to (1) assess whether its use is viable, and (2) inform the state DOTs of the key issues to consider when using performance-based road-maintenance contracting. The purpose of this paper is to address this need by providing a comprehensive evaluation of VDOT’s overall experience with its pilot performance-based road-maintenance contract. The findings from the analyses over a period of 6 years indicate that while meeting or coming very close to the performance targets most of the time, there have been years in which the contractor was not able to meet performance targets in fence-to-fence asset groups and bridges. As far as the comparison of the level-of-service effectiveness performance of the contractor with that of VDOT utilizing traditional maintenance approaches is concerned, our findings show that the contractor outperformed VDOT in fence-to-fence asset groups. The key issues that a state DOT should consider when using performance-based road-maintenance contracting, as learned from VDOT’s pilot project experience, can be summarized as (1) tying payments to be made to the contractor to actual performance, (2) generating a detailed baseline condition information, (3) using performance targets that increase (as opposed to being constant) over the contract period, (4) establishing a performance target for every single item required to be maintained, (5) having multiple inspections per year, (6) developing a standard rating procedure for all elements, and (7) developing objective, quantifiable, and easily measurable performance criteria.