Benefit-Cost Analysis of Weather Information for Winter Maintenance

Surface transportation in the United States is continuously affected by adverse weather conditions, which contribute to thousands of highway fatalities and billions of dollars in economic loss every year. Winter weather has its own peculiar challenges, to which transportation agencies respond through winter maintenance operations. Recent trends toward proactive winter maintenance operations have placed a premium on the value of timely and accurate weather information that reflects current and forecast conditions in the roadway environment. However, few studies have sought to quantify this value and compare it to the costs of obtaining such customized weather information. The Utah Department of Transportation (DOT) implemented a weather operations program that assists the agency's operations, maintenance, and construction functions by providing detailed, often customized, area-specific weather forecasts. This program's genesis provides a useful case study to quantify the cost-effectiveness of weather information. Described is the application of an artificial neural network model using winter maintenance cost data from dozens of Utah DOT maintenance sheds for the 2004 to 2005 winter to estimate the cost-effectiveness of this program. The model estimated the value and additional saving potential of the Utah DOT weather service to be 11% to 25% and 4% to 10% of the Utah DOT labor and materials cost for winter maintenance, respectively. On the basis of the program's cost, the benefit-cost ratio was calculated at over 11:1. The results highlight the potential benefits that may be realized by an agency using improved weather information to direct its winter maintenance activities.