Proposed method for estimating the costs of safety barrier life cycle

Today barrier types are frequently selected for their price with little regard for the total costs the structure will incur over its lifetime. One of the basic tools designed to manage road infrastructure is the life cycle cost method (LCC, Life cycle cost). It sums up the costs to plan, design, build, operate (use and maintain) and decommission a road structure. Having developed dynamically at the turn of the century the method is now widely applied in a number of industries including traffic engineering. Today, depending on data availability and calculation complexity, two groups of life cycle assessments are distinguished: analytical and parametric. Unfortunately, each comes with some limitations and the search for a new universal life cycle cost calculation method continues. The authors propose their own general concept of a method for estimating the life cycle costs of road safety barriers. The article presents a multi-stage process to build the method which is based on international experience and real test site data