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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. To combat this the City has a Pavement Management Program to constantly monitor existing roads so that maintenance and repair, as well as pavement sealing, resurfacing and rehabilitation, are accomplished at the most cost effective stages.

The City's Pavement Management Program will be fully operational by April of 2008. This system will allow all of the City streets to be inventoried and graded on an annual basis. It will also identify and produce a list every year of streets that need to be overlaid, removed and replaced, and slurry sealed.

It is more cost effective to repair roads sooner rather than later. The fiscal impact can be identified both in the short term and long term, and with this ability the City's identification methods will be able to address streets that currently require reconstruction and repair, and efficiently project future needs. This approach will allow the City to allocate funding to each of the three scenarios listed below:

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. Slurry seal is spread over the entire pavement area, and 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 five 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, typically the City will contract out to the private sector for 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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