Five-Year Road Rehab Overlay and Slurry Seal Program
Location
City-wide
City or County Responsible for Project
City of Santa Clarita
Category
Roads: Efficient and Sustainable Road Maintenance, Construction and Reconstruction Projects.
Author
Robert Newman
City of Santa Clarita – Department of Public Works
23920 Valencia Blvd, Santa Clarita, CA 91355
661-284-1429
Project Description
In an effort to increase cost-effectiveness, while delivering high quality service, the City of Santa Clarita (City) opted to adopt a critical-point management system to manage its 516 miles of major and minor streets – repaving nearly100 miles of roadway annually. Using an unbiased, standardized street selection process, the City established a five-year “Road Rehab” program with a goal of increasing the City’s Pavement Condition Index (PCI) from 64 to 70 by the year 2020 through the use of additional preventative maintenance techniques, some of which are as follows: Micro surfacing with fiber, which is a technique that adds fiberglass to a thin mixture of asphalt emulsion and aggregate to retard reflective cracking and delivers a smooth finish that protects against damage from weather. Although this approach increases the cost by about a third when compared to a non-fibrous micro surfacing, this technique will add additional years to the pavement life and can even be used on pavements more susceptible to cracking, which allows the City to include more streets in the project annually. Another highly used technique is thin maintenance overlay (TMO), a 3/8-inch mix of terminal blended rubberized binder, which is laid between 1 ¼ to 1 ½ thick in place of a cape seal for streets that have deteriorated beyond a slurry seal’s maintenance. TMO has a service life equal to or greater than a cape seal, and costs the same. By adapting to a road preservation approach, and incorporating innovative and highly cost-effective techniques–fibrous slurry seals and thin maintenance overlays–the City was able to increase the amount of pavement maintained from five-million square feet to nearly eight-million square feet for the same cost as previous years! As a result, the City of Santa Clarita’s previous PCI of 64 has gone up three points to 67!
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