Long-Term Monitoring of Low-Volume Road Performance in Ontario

The purpose of this paper is to review the pavement rehabilitation and maintenance treatments used on Ontario provincial highways over the last two decades, analyze pavement life-cycle costs and overall long-term performance of the previous typical pavement structures, and to compare the pavement performance curves of specific pavement maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) treatments applied to these low-volume roads. These objectives are applied to Ontario’s low-volume roads which comprise about 20 percent of the total provincial road network. The long-term monitoring of pavement performance trends on these low-volume roads includes performance measures of pavement roughness, distress and overall pavement condition. This paper begins with an overviews of the pavement rehabilitation and re-construction activities that are commonly used for low-volume roads in Ontario, which are listed in the Ministry’s pavement management system (PMS/2). The paper then goes on to discuss typical pavement M&R treatments, historical performance records and predicted performance trends, addressing the best practices in rehabilitating low-volume roads in Ontario. This paper also presents some preliminary findings and conclusions based on the long-term pavement performance observations and economic analyses are presented in the paper.