Highway Infrastructure

Federal, state, and local governments will need to spend about $50 million annually through the year 2011 to maintain the nation's highway infrastructure. This figure substantially exceeds the $26 billion spent in 1991 for construction and capital repairs for highways built with federal assistance. These funding levels make it imperative that investments in federal-aid highways be cost-effective. This report (1) reviews states' experiences with using warranties in highway contracts and the factors that promote or discourage the use of such warranties, (2) identifies efforts to provide adequate maintenance for federal-aid highways, and (3) identifies opportunities for improving states' procedures for selecting pavement designs.

GAO found that: (1) states' use of contract warranties is limited but generally satisfactory; (2) contractors have raised concerns as to whether warranties are fair and enforceable; (3) federal guidance could help states assess when warranties would be an effective tool for promoting quality; (4) many states have backlogs of maintenance projects, mainly because of resource constraints; (5) Federal Highway Administration (FHwA) oversight has not ensured that states adequately maintain federal-aid highways; (6) FHwA has not established maintenance performance standards for federal-aid highways; (7) many states do not consider the results of life-cycle cost analyses and exclude important data, such as maintenance costs, in selecting pavement designs; and (8) the lack of guidance on what design factors need to be analyzed undermines the states' use of this approach in making investment decisions.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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