Pavement Management as Part of Strategic Road Management

The investment in roads and road transportation forms a major part of a government's stock of public capital. Fur-thermore, the importance of roads and related economic as-sets make it vital that these should be well managed to ensure optimum use of the road network. The severe cutbacks in road funding during recent years have, however, made it dif-ficult even to maintain the existing road network properly. The response of the South African Department of Transport has been to match expectations of the long-term funding arrangements with the needs of the road network through strategic management. Strategic management necessitated an integrated road management system especially because the Department of Transport is responsible for managing the en-tire road network administered by various regional authori-ties. South Africa opted for a modular system that embraces a number of subsystems, of which the pavement manage-ment system has been developed to a greater extent than the others. A further need was for compatibiliqv among the var-ious regional systems to obviate a possible mismatch of fun