Defining and Serving Clients for Pavements

Abstract

Total client satisfaction is a goal toward which any service or product provider, including pavement engineers, should strive. If this is to be achieved, the clients for pavements must be well identified, as should be the measures to be used for judging their satisfaction. The key sets of pavement clients are defined, in relation to the different classes of pavements, including roads, off-road areas, airfields, and railbeds. The means by which effective pavement management can serve clients is then addressed. Next, some possible measures of client satisfaction are identified, including ride quality, surface distress, structural adequacy, surface friction, surface drainage, noise, user delays, and life-cycle cost-effectiveness. The degree of importance for different client-measure combinations is suggested, as well. The technologies available for characterizing the measures are described briefly, and some examples are given. Finally, the results of a simple pilot study to determine the relative value of the measures of road user client satisfaction are related; they suggest that on a scale of 0 to 100, ride quality would contribute about 25 percent to overall customer satisfaction, surface distress nearly 20 percent, and all the other measures between about 5 and 10 percent each.