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City of Palmdale Public Works

Pavement Management

Even as new roads are built, existing roads within the City of Palmdale are put to the test every day by natural elements, such as sun, rain and ice, by utility maintenance road cuts, such as water line repairs, and by the increasing traffic volumes within the City. The Public Works Department has implemented a Pavement Management Program that monitors and evaluates our new and aging roads so that maintenance and repair, as well as pavement sealing, resurfacing and rehabilitation, are accomplished at the most cost effective stages.

This year Public Works is upgrading the Pavement Management Program to include a software program developed by the Army Corps of Engineers, called Micropaver. This program will re-evaluate and grade all of the city's roads and provide them with a Pavement Management Index (PMI) as of July 2008. All the roads will be graded on a scale of 1 to 100. The grading scale will determine both priority and method of repair, 100 being the best and 0 being the worst.

The use of this program will provide City Staff as well as City Council a better way to track pavement conditions, repair backlog, need assessments, and budget forecasting.

Once the City has established the July 2008 base line, the database will be updated every year as improvements take place. Every 2-3 years, the roads will be re-evaluated and re-graded with a new PMI to identify pavement degradation trends, to evaluate the effectiveness of our pavement maintenance efforts and to establish new budgets. Implementation of this program will help ensure that we are getting the maximum life expectancy out of our roadway infrastructure investment.

The following is a list of remedies that are typically performed under the Pavement Management Program:

Maintenance and Repair
This remedy is usually ongoing and can involve the cleaning and sealing of pavement cracks, the application of thin overlays of pavement to fill ruts, the sealing of the pavement surface, and the repair of potholes and severely cracked areas. These remedies are intended to extend the life of the pavement by protecting it from water damage, and to provide a better driving surface, and are typically performed by the City's Public Works Maintenance Division.

Pavement Sealing
In certain cases, such as when large sections of roads have been maintained and repaired numerous times, the surface can become so disjointed and difficult to drive on that the pavement needs another remedy. A remedy that is initially evaluated is usually a treatment involving a mixture of liquid asphalt and sand, commonly referred to as a slurry seal, that is spread over the entire pavement area. To the traveling public it may look like the City is "painting" the liquid asphalt on, however this is done so that the pavement is completely sealed and protected from water damage. This fairly inexpensive remedy can extend the life of a roadway by as many as 5 years, allowing limited resources to be utilized on other roads which may need more extensive and costly remedies. Although the City's Public Works Maintenance Division can perform this work on smaller areas, the City contracts out to the private sector larger areas.

Pavement Resurfacing
In those cases in which pavement sealing would not prove effective, the City may opt to provide an entirely new pavement surface, which can vary in thickness from 1" to 2". Sometimes this new surface is placed directly on top of the old surface which effectively increases the vehicle capacity of the road. Other factors may require the old surface to be milled with a milling machine prior to the placement of the new asphalt surface. Resurfacing is much more expensive than sealing, and the option to mill the old surface further increases the cost of resurfacing; therefore resurfacing is only accomplished as resources allow.

Pavement Rehabilitation/Reconstruction
When the pavement is extensively damaged or has an inadequate structural section for the quantity and type of vehicle traffic, the best remedy may be to remove the existing pavement structure and replace it with a new adequate structure. This is the most expensive remedy and is therefore only recommended in the most extreme cases.

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