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The purpose of this paper is to present a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method, by combining the AHP, ELECTRE II, ELECTRE III, ELECTRE IV and Copeland techniques for road maintenance prioritization, in which the roads are evaluated and ranked based on various criteria. The proposed method is applied to four streets in Tehran, as a case study.

First, a set of criteria for road maintenance was determined and their weights were obtained using the AHP method. Four streets in Tehran, Iran were considered as alternatives and prioritized using the ELECTRE II, ELECTRE III and ELECTRE IV methods. Finally, the results of employing the three methods were integrated using the Copeland method and a final result was obtained.

The findings of the study suggested that “road safety” is the most important criterion in maintenance and “traffic volume” and “pavement quality index (PCI)” have the second and third rank in importance. Moreover, “The width of the street” is the least important criterion in road maintenance. Additionally, the streets' final ranking was obtained using the proposed method.

The proposed method helps managers effectively assign their limited budget and resources to roads with higher maintenance priority and as the result, increase the roads efficiency.

In this research, eight main criteria were collected using previous researches and experts' opinions. Also, a new combination of different MCDM techniques is proposed in this research.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the extent of, rationales for and outcomes of contracting out in the local road and park sectors in Norway. For understanding the use of contracting out in local governments, it highlights the relevance of the capability perspective in organisational literature as an alternative to the standard efficiency perspective.

The paper draws on four expert interviews and survey data gathered from park and road managers in Norwegian municipalities in 2015.

The study suggests that Norwegian municipalities primarily contract out park and road maintenance services when they do not have the capability to perform these services themselves. Cost concerns are also highlighted but of less importance. Moreover, lack of competition renders the use of contracting out as a potentially costly and less satisfying arrangement for organising service delivery.

While the scope is limited to one country, Norway, future research may benefit from the theoretical perspectives, which have been used.

Policy guidelines should support a flexible use of various arrangements for service provision.

The dominating view among proponents of marketisation in the public sector suggests that contracting out to private contractors is undertaken to enhance economic efficiency compared to keeping service production in-house. This study suggests that this is not always the case – even in “most likely” sectors such as park and road maintenance.

Different models have been adopted in England over time to organise public service delivery. The purpose of this paper is to explore contracting-out, a prevalent model of public service delivery in England, in relation to parks and roads maintenance delivery by examining private contractors’ performance according to local authority stakeholders.

Since the Conservative Government was in power during the 1980s, local authorities have been an arena for experimentation of contracting-out to private and other sectors. This paper provides a review of the academic and grey literature, and findings are presented from a large-scale online questionnaire survey (n=103) which was distributed to the relevant public realm managers in English local authorities.

The paper shows that contracting-out of parks and roads maintenance happens across the country in different ways. By and large, local authorities are satisfied with the performance of contractors, particularly as a response to economic constraints. Responsibilities, particularly for parks, are increasingly shared with non-governmental organisations, including community groups, although this is not reflected in budget distribution.

Despite the efforts, the response rate was relatively low (32 per cent), potentially due to the e-mail communication and online nature of the questionnaire.

The research provides empirical evidence about how contracting-out is currently delivering public services and how it has changed in recent years. The findings suggest that responsibilities (and to a lesser extent, budgets) are increasingly shared in England between different combinations of public, private, third and community sector stakeholders. This marks a shift away from in-house public sector delivery of parks and roads services.

This paper aims to identify the main aspects requiring immediate attention in the post-disaster reconstruction of road infrastructure, thereby providing a major synthesis, which advances the understanding in this important area.

Literature and empirical evidence obtained from documents and semi-structured interviews with 28 respondents of three case study districts in Aceh, Indonesia was analysed using NVivo 10. The findings were validated through triangulation with the literature and consultation with the experts in the field of disaster management and road infrastructure.

The authors propose a framework for the reconstruction of road infrastructure, which respond to the peculiarities of road projects in a post-disaster setting. The framework comprises various components requiring detailed attention in the reconstruction process and describes their position in the road project and disaster management cycle.

The framework fills the gap in the body of knowledge with regard to road infrastructure reconstruction in a post-disaster context. For the first time, this paper recognises the importance of local government capacity in the Aceh Province with regard to the sustainability of the post-disaster reconstruction assets.

To maintain road systems in the USA, state departments of transportation (DOTs) generally use in-house workers or private contractors. Limited studies have calculated the cost savings of hiring private contractors; however, most of them have not calculated cost savings based on life-cycle costs (LCCs). The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the LCC of chip seal and stripping maintenance activities performed by in-house workers are cheaper than those performed by private contractors.

The paper collected the hard cost data of chip seal and stripping maintenance activities performed by state DOT in-house workers, as well as private contractors, from 2003 to 2016 from the Nevada DOT Maintenance and Asset Management division. Statistical tests were conducted to test the research hypothesis that the LCC of chip seal and stripping activities performed by in-house workers are significantly less than those performed by private contractors.

The study results showed that the cost per unit and LCC of chip seal and striping work performed by in-house workers were significantly less than those performed by private contractors in Nevada.

The study only collected data from Nevada DOT, so readers should use caution in generalizing the findings of this study. Additionally, factors affecting the cost of these maintenance activities for private contractors are significantly different compared to in-house contractors. Therefore, these differences may be some of the potential reasons for cost difference between these two methods.

The practical implications of this study are that state DOT engineers need to plan for outsourcing chip seal and stripping maintenance activities only to private contractors that are cost effective, based on life-cycle cost.

The LCC analysis framework developed in this study will help state DOT engineers to determine cost savings by using in-house workers for road maintenance works.

Many road authorities considered contracting out road maintenance to the private sector based on performance measures as an alternative and better solution than traditional methods of contracting. It highlights issues of interest to road authorities in the context of saving maintenance costs and managing contracting times effectively. This method is named as performance based maintenance by contracting (PBMC) and has substantial success records in minimizing infrastructure maintenance costs in many developed and developing countries over the last two decades. It has received the attention of researchers and practitioners. However, the literature on PBMC is reasonably high although the concept of PBMC is relatively new. The purpose of this paper is to carry out a comprehensive state of the art review of the literature that has been conducted in the recent years.

A total of 62 published report and journal articles related to performance based maintenance by contracting for road network system has been analysed and reviewed in this paper.

This paper analyses the literature on PBMC and presents examples of developed and developing countries that have been successfully maintaining their road network systems using PBMC as their preferred method of contracting.

The potential of reducing maintenance costs, increasing the quality of works and reducing the chance of corruption in the long run in developing countries are the challenging issues for PBMC, which needs more attention. This paper can be used as a base or platform for future research in the area of PBMC such as developing optimal policies and cost models.

This paper would be useful for the research on PBMC. It would be beneficial for the engineers or professionals in improving the performance of road maintenance and management.

Transport infrastructure in most countries is owned and maintained either by public authorities, private organisations, or individuals. However, in Sweden, about 50 per cent of the road network is owned and maintained by civic road associations. By using the analytic notion of commoning, this chapter seeks to explore how road maintenance is organised and in what ways civic participation is contributing to infrastructure maintenance. Through interviews with representatives of civic road associations in Vellinge municipality and municipal representatives, we conclude that property owners are being commoned, that is, they are obliged to be a member of the civic road association in the neighbourhood where they own property. This means that property owners are given the opportunity to collectively decide on matters of road infrastructure, including maintenance and investments. Each civic road association is also acting as an organisational collective, demanding or pressuring the municipality and its politicians to reform subsidies and the organisation of ownership of roads and responsibility for their maintenance. As a single property owner, this is difficult, but as an organisational collective, in a civic road association, they have a voice. As a citizen, local municipal election offers opportunities to push for change, but at these institutionalised moments of democracy, road infrastructure issues compete with other issues. Election campaigns rarely target road maintenance, although Vellinge seems to be an exception here. Nevertheless, as citizenship is built around the provision of universal and evenly distributed infrastructure, crumbling infrastructure in different parts of the municipality tends to raise concerns over equal access and opportunities – and also differentiated citizenships.

Over the past decade, there has been growing international interest in utilising private contractors to improve efficiency and reduce costs of road maintenance. In developing countries the existing private contracting sector is often too weak to take on this work. Accordingly projects to foster private sector involvement have been designed and implemented through international technical assistance, with a varying emphasis on financial, training and other support in order to achieve a workable market. This paper discusses case studies from five different countries which vary widely, in terms of social, cultural, contractual and organizational practices. While there are many different aspects to a construction development programme the paper discusses the issues of international assistance, training programmes, equipment provision, contracts and payments, programme objectives, contractor selection. Lessons are drawn from previous project experience in order to propose guidelines for future contractor development projects.

An important feature in managing road infrastructures is the growing use of performance-based contracts (PBCs) in the delivery of maintenance. The expectations are high. But there are also risks connected to PBC. The main question for road agencies is: how to achieve as much as possible of the expected advantages while limiting the possible disadvantages? The purpose of this paper is to answer that question and explore how PBC of maintenance can be improved.

Based on theoretical constructs this paper investigates the strategies of the English Highways Agency and the Dutch Rijkswaterstaat, when outsourcing the maintenance of their existing road infrastructures and the effects of their strategies.

The paper finds that road agencies should focus on the process of interaction of the main actors involved, rather than the performance measurement systems (PMS) itself. The agencies should adjust their governance to the degree of uncertainty. PBC requires an informed and knowledgeable principal.

The in-depth study is limited to two road agencies. More systematic research is needed in linking theoretical constructs with empirical evidence from more road agencies. The method applied in this paper can be used for further research.

The lessons drawn from the case studies offer potential benefits to other road authorities that use or consider PBC as their method of delivery of maintenance.

Where only few empirical studies have investigated in detail the actual achievements of PBC in road maintenance, this empirical research aims to fill that gap.