Roadway Surface Conversion Guidelines:

Gravel vs Paved
By undergraduate Chad Olney, working with graduate student Himanshu Patel,
under Dr. Sunanda Dissanayake, for the Kansas Department of Transportation
Abstract:
There are more than 53,000 miles of gravel roads in Kansas, maintained by county governments. With increasing budget constraints on transportation budgets, county road departments struggle to maintain both
their gravel and paved roads in the most cost effect manner possible. One of the hardest decisions faced by the county officials is deciding whether to continue maintaining certain sections of gravel roads, upgrade
the section to a paved road, or downgrade the section to a minimal maintenance road. In this research, the factors such as maintenance cost, conversion costs, traffic volume, safety, and road purpose that affects this
decision are analyzed in order to establish a set of guidelines that county governments can use in the decision making process. The data for this research was accrued by sending out surveys to 105 Kansas counties
and collaborating with transportation professionals in county governments. Based on the survey results, the conversion cost was the most important factor in deciding whether or not to upgrade a road. This was followed closely by current maintenance cost. Traffic volume and purpose of road usage were also important factors for transportation officials, with particular importance placed on the amount of heavy vehicle (i.e.
semi-trucks) traffic. These research results can be an important tool that can be used by county officials in the decision making process of determining how to best spend their road maintenance allocations.

Goal:

Approach:

To establish guidelines for county transportation departments that can be used to determine which gravel roads
are advantageous to upgrade to a paved surface and
which paved roads should be allowed to degrade back to
gravel.

Meet with county engineers to determine what factors are considered when deciding
on road surfacing.
Collect survey data from 77 county transportation departments around the state of
Kansas on what importance they place on the factors that influence their decision making process.

Conclusion:

Data:
County officials were asked to rank the factors that affected their decisions to have a
road be gravel or paved. A Likert Scale was used to organize the survey responses: Very
Important was given a score of 1.00, Important a 0.75, Moderately Important a
0.50, Less Important a 0.25, and not important was given a 0.00.

The responses were then plugged into the following equation to better show the results.
Where:

S = Scaled Value for each factor

n = Number of categories of importance
Ci = Counts of each factor for respective n
si = Score for each factor for respective n
N = Total number of responses

Initial construction cost and by maintenance cost

were the most important factors in deciding a roadway
surface with scores of 0.90 and 0.86 respectively.
Regarding road purpose of the road, heavy vehicle traffic was determined to be the most important with a score
of .83