Best Practices for Surface Treatments

Preventive maintenance is defined by AASHTO as “a planned strategy of cost-effective treatments to an existing roadway system that preserves the system, retards future deterioration, and maintains, or improves the functional condition (without adding additional structural capacity)”. Thus a treatment used as a stop-gap measure to hold together a distressed pavement would not be considered a cost effective PM treatment. The AASHTO definition encourages a paradigm shift away from a reactive mindset that responds to distresses in the pavement, toward a proactive one that seeks to prevent, or reduce the occurrence of distresses by selecting the right road and using the best methods at the proper time.