Impact of Maintenance and Rehabilitation Costs on Road-Users Costs (Case Study: Road Network of Boein Zahra-Saveh)

In order to select the appropriate projects and maintenance strategies for lowest long-term costs, the analysis of road-users costs is very important. This can be considered an essential tool for decision-making on investment for new and existing roads. Consequently, understanding the impact of maintenance and rehabilitation costs on road-users costs is very important and the benefits of regular and periodic maintenance is dependent on this relationship. Therefore, in this research, the economic impact of maintenance and rehabilitation costs on road-users costs with a case study involving a main-road network of Iran has been investigated.  On this basis, and with the help of Matlab software, a sensitivity analysis on the effective factors for road-users costs is performed for this selected road network. The results of the analysis indicated that an additional agency investment of one million Rials results in average direct savings to road users of 0.72 Rials per vehicle km. The results obtained for this case study also indicated that the impact of maintenance and rehabilitation costs on road-users costs reduces at a decreasing rate. In other words, great investment expenditures cannot be justified in the field of road maintenance for decreasing the users costs, while the maintenance and rehabilitation costs are too much.