AASHTO Journal - WVDOT Switching to Pavement Preservation Strategy

An accelerated statewide paving program over the past several years has put the West Virginia Department of Transportation in a position to transition its focus to pavement preservation strategies within the next three years.

[Above photo by WVDOT]

Pavement preservation refers to projects to extend the life of existing pavements through a variety of methods such as cape seals, fog seals, and overlays.

On its current path, with the pace of paving projects around the state, the WVDOT believes it will soon be able to shift its focus away from catching up on road maintenance to “getting ahead” on road preservation efforts.

“We set out on a plan,” noted said Jimmy Wriston, WVDOT secretary, in a statement. “We started with our interstates, we worked down through our US routes and the West Virginia routes. We undertook a plan to literally go in and do full depth reclamation, to rebuild those interstates from the base up. We did hundreds of miles of interstate in the last eight years.”

[Editor’s note: Wriston touched on some of these issues in a “State DOT 2-Minute Update” video produced by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.]

Wriston cited the $2.8 billion “Roads to Prosperity” program pushed by Governor Jim Justice (R) and passed by the state’s legislature in 2017 as one reason why the agency is poised to make this shift in its road maintenance focus.

He also noted that the state’s “Secondary Roads Initiative,” passed in 2019 and concentrated on repairing and paving smaller rural roads statewide, has also helped WVDOT make this strategic shift in its maintenance focus.

“We’re at a point now, according to our analytics, our plan, and where we are in our plan, we think over the next three years we’re going to be in that spot to where nearly 90 percent of our paving activities will literally be preservation programs,” Wriston said. “It will be cheaper, it will be more efficient, and we’ll have a highway system we can actually maintain decade after decade, instead of managing the decline of our system decade after decade.”

Supplemental budget appropriations requested by the governor and approved by the state legislature further enabled WVDOT to embark on an unprecedented construction and maintenance program that has included the paving of thousands of miles of West Virginia highways.

“It’s an incredible achievement that this department has accomplished,” Wriston said. “And they’ve done it … partnering with industry, with the engineering side, the construction side, [and] our own maintenance side. We have augmented the contractor’s capabilities, while still focusing on core activities, to get the entire system. We’ve taken a systems approach with data driven decision making concepts to get the roads moving in the right direction.”