Measuring the efficiency of highway maintenance contracting strategies: A bootstrapped non‐parametric meta‐frontier approach

Highly deteriorated US road infrastructure, major budgetary restrictions and the significant growth in traffic have led to an emerging need for improving performance of highway maintenance practices. Privatizing some portions of road maintenance operations by state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) under the auspices of performance‐based contracts has been one of the innovative initiatives in response to such a need. This paper adapts the non‐parametric meta‐frontier framework to the two‐stage bootstrapping technique to develop an analytical approach for evaluating the relative efficiency of two highway maintenance contracting strategies. The first strategy pertains to the 180 miles of Virginia’s Interstate highways maintained by Virginia DOT using traditional maintenance practices. The second strategy pertains to the 250 miles of Virginia’s Interstate highways maintained via a Public Private Partnership using a performance‐based maintenance approach. The meta‐frontier approach accounts for the heterogeneity that exists among different types of highway maintenance contracts due to different limitations and regulations. The two‐stage bootstrapping technique accounts for the large set of uncontrollable factors that affect the highway deterioration processes. The preliminary findings, based on the historical data for the state of Virginia, suggest that road authorities (counties) that have used traditional contracting for transforming the maintenance expenditures into the improvement of the road conditions seem to be more efficient than road authorities that have used the performance‐based contracting. This paper recommends that road authorities use hybrid contracting approaches that include best practices of both traditional and performance‐based highway maintenance contracting.