7 Estimating Gotchas That Will Blow Your Paving Budget (Even With Great Data)
Modern tools give us unprecedented speed and baseline accuracy, but high-quality estimates still rely on sound engineering judgment. Use technology to find your candidate roads and build your macro budget, apply a disciplined 15% contingency, and always field-verify before you sign off on the final bid.
The PCI Plateau: Why Some Cities Pay Twice as Much Just to Stand Still
In past posts, we looked at the pavement aging curve and the role it plays in how much it costs to move, or even just hold, a city's average PCI. The natural assumption, and the one we started with, is that the relationship is continuous: the lower your PCI, the more it costs to maintain, scaling up steadily as you climb. We ran the actual numbers on four real city networks to test that assumption. It turned out to be wrong, in a way that's more useful than the original assumption would have been.