OPINION:
In a 2018 magazine article, retired Army Reserve Lt. Col. Lee Lacy asked the question: “Who from the current generation of leaders will repair, rebuild, and expand the [Interstate Highway System]?”
Lacy also observed, “The IHS is an icon and marvel of man’s ingenuity. Great leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower and Lucius Clay had the foresight to conceive and build a network of interconnecting highways that helped to shape and define postwar America.”
Data estimates that over 80 percent of the nearly 47,000 miles of the IHS completed by the 1990s was constructed with concrete, and most of the IHS remains in service today.
The current generation of leaders has the tools at their disposal to be the ones who expand, strengthen and rebuild that infrastructure. In working with a construction industry that is ready to take on the challenge, the focus should be on resilience and long-lasting performance, which will lead to increased safety, efficiency, and innovation. Cues can be taken from the IHS founders themselves. The Eisenhower administration knew it was important to achieve durability in the nation’s infrastructure, building things to last. In 2025, it is time to think about how we build an even stronger and functional system.
With economic concerns dominating day-to-day construction decisions, the single best way to lower costs for the materials highway agencies use is to promote healthy competition. The most familiar kind of competition, when it comes to pavement projects, is intra-industry competition. Intra-industry competition occurs between bidders who will be supplying only one pavement material. To get more bidders involved, it is helpful to implement inter-industry competition, where more design and material options are readily available.
In tracking public bid prices, it becomes clear that when additional layers of competition are introduced, the entire industry responds, and prices go down for surface materials including both asphalt and concrete. States with high inter-industry competition have been shown to pay approximately 8 to 29% less for pavement materials compared to states with low levels of inter-industry competition. Competition helps reduce pavement costs and can ultimately allow an agency to stretch existing funding and build and preserve more miles in a cost-efficient manner.
Another way to improve the efficiency of our infrastructure investment is to support rigorous asset management. To be cost-effective, DOT budgets should strike a balance between minor and major improvements (what has been dubbed a “mix of fixes”). This approach combines short-, medium-, and long-term pavement treatment activities that provide different service lives, thus reducing the amount of pavement to be repaired at any given time. A mix-of-fixes approach can achieve the same level of road quality for millions of dollars less, compared to continually relying on a “worst-first” repair strategy. DOTs should be encouraged to review a wide range of fixes to lower costs over the long-term and promote the effective management of assets.
Determining the best long-term asset management strategy is a balancing act between limited financial resources and sustained highway performance. While short-term fixes are usually cheaper and therefore allow DOTs to stretch their budget over more of the pavement network during a given interval, taking only this approach can lead to a situation in which the entire network needs preservation or some other repair activity during the same interval. Mixing in long-term strategies that include resilient, yet economical solutions, such as concrete overlays, full-depth pavements, or any of a number of other engineered maintenance techniques, achieves consistency in the amount of work to be performed from year to year, lessening the likelihood of a funding crisis and lowering annual cost requirements while increasing safety and creating better overall road conditions.
Increasing federal infrastructure funding to support pavement projects is an efficient use of resources and leads to new jobs while benefiting taxpayers and communities throughout the country. Stretching tax dollars while maintaining the highly functional and emblematic highway system we have inherited is a worthy goal. Promoting effective inter-industry competition and taking a forward-thinking approach to pavement management systems are a big part of the solution. We have the ingenuity and materials ready to build an even better system than the marvel created by Eisenhower. The concrete industry stands ready to work. Put us to work!
• Laura O’Neill Kaumo is president and CEO, American Concrete Pavement Association. Eric Ferrebee is senior director of technical services, American Concrete Pavement Association.
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