Usage-based pricing of highway construction cost

Highway construction cost allocation has been a common concern among legislatures, highway agencies, highway and users for their different perspective of focus. It is directly relevant to the issue of equity involving cost responsibility and actual user fee charges. Continuous effort has been made to rationalize highway construction cost allocation. Few existing approaches are satisfactory due to lack of traffic data or the deficiency of the approach per se. This study proposes a new and more holistic approach for highway construction cost allocation based on usage of different user groups. Two usage-based allocators, vehicle miles travel on axles and on axle load, are established in this study for three cost components, right of way, non-load and load related pavement costs. In determining load related cost, a recently developed mechanistic empirical pavement design guide is employed to come up with more realistic estimation of each user group's responsibility. With traffic volume data from TLOG and axle load data from weigh-in-motion station, a case study is conducted for allocating highway construction cost in a segment of interstate highway in Texas. The results are provided with cost percentages among different user groups. For the covering abstract see ITRD E157233