 It's been a massive undertaking, spanning 40-plus years, costing well over $100 billion, stretching from coast to coast. Ever since President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act in 1956, the focus of transportation funding has been on construction. Our interstate and national highway systems are the largest public works projects in our country's history, achieved through a unique partnership between the states and the federal government, forming the foundation of our transportation infrastructure, the backbone of our nation's economy. Time, traffic and nature take their tolls on our pavements as the demands on our highway network continue to increase dramatically. At the same time, operating funds have decreased significantly. Revenues simply don't keep pace with needs. In many cases, too, severe reductions in staff contribute to the burden and to the problem. For many years, the resources needed to sufficiently preserve our highway infrastructure have been underfunded. We now have needs that far exceed the resources available. The old philosophy of worst first meant directing funds to highways most in need of costly rehabilitation and reconstruction. Preventive maintenance has too often been delayed or neglected entirely, causing minor defects to become major ones, requiring more expensive repairs, disrupting traffic for longer periods of time, adding much higher costs and inconvenience over the life of the pavement. But the old philosophy is shifting to a new paradigm, protecting our pavements through preventive maintenance. One of our prime responsibilities is to maintain the investment we have in our transportation infrastructure. And the best way to do this is through preventive maintenance. Congress and the Federal Highway Administration are committed to the timely preservation of our highway infrastructure. As a result of amendments to the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, strengthened by changes to the National Highway System Bill, federal aid funds are available for cost-effective preventive maintenance programs. Preventive maintenance that extends the useful life of our transportation assets. Every year we extend the useful life of a pavement or a bridge is a year that we don't have to make that large investment needed to rehabilitate or reconstruct. We can continue to provide a level of service our customers want and even demand with a smaller investment and less disruption to traffic. Unlike reactive maintenance that works to correct a specific pavement distress, preventive maintenance is proactive, making the most of modern cost-effective ways to preserve and protect pavement integrity. The goal is to keep the highway network at a given level of quality. And the benefit? Preventive maintenance decreases the rate of deterioration and can delay for years, maybe even indefinitely, costly reconstruction of pavements. Hello, I'm Gary Hoffman, Chief Engineer for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Pavement deterioration of all types can best be represented by this characteristic curve. During the first portion of a pavement's useful life, the pavement is generally smooth and the rate of deterioration is slow. However, as the pavement ages and gets rougher, the daily pounding of heavy vehicles begins to take its toll. Surface cracks develop, water forces its way into these surface cracks, and the pavement deteriorates more rapidly. It is easy for just about anyone to tell when a pavement has reached the end of its useful life, represented on this chart by point B. The real key to a successful preventive maintenance program lies in an agency's ability to predict when a pavement will reach point A and then to program sufficient resources to apply the right preventive maintenance treatment. If we can continue on a major portion of our system to extend its life for relatively low costs another five to ten years, and repeat this, the overall savings in the long run is going to be very, very substantial. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials defines preventive maintenance as the planned strategy of cost-effective treatments to an existing roadway system and its appurtenances that preserves the system, retards future deterioration, and maintains or improves the functional condition of the system without increasing the structural capacity. In essence, it means doing the right treatment to the right road at the right time. And the right time to begin is now. Given this positive interest by Congress and AISTO, it is now incumbent on each of us, working collectively, to advance the concepts for timely preventive maintenance. We must focus on the technical aspects of materials, design, and construction practices. Improved planning and dedicated funding strategies are also essential for the successful development of a pavement preservation program. Techniques of preventive maintenance range from relatively inexpensive bituminous crack sealing, micro surfacing, and chip sealing to the more expensive thin asphalt overlays to other techniques on flexible pavements such as in-place recycling of existing asphalt. For rigid pavements, the treatments include full-depth concrete pavement repairs, joint resealing, diamond grinding, and dowel bar retrofits for aging concrete roadways. Using less expensive treatments where appropriate enables spreading the preventive maintenance dollars over more route miles. Because staff members may not have much knowledge or experience with preventive maintenance methods, a strong commitment to training is essential to the success of the program. People and resources are available to teach personnel about the performance characteristics of the various techniques, how to select pavements that will benefit from preventive treatment, and when, in the life of the pavement, is the right time to do the job. For example, if crack sealing will correct the condition, then there's no need to apply a seal coat or a thin overlay to be cost-effective. It's important to keep the project as simple as possible. Improved planning is the crux of the preventive maintenance program. Here too, simplification leads to savings. Projects should be kept very, very simple in preventive maintenance program. In Kansas, we let our projects with sketches on eight-and-a-half by eleven sheets of paper prepared by our field people and included in the project proposal. It's been very effective with our contractors since most of these are crack-filling, pavement patching, thin overlays, even thicker overlays where we're not changing the cross-section considerably. There's no need to waste a lot of time on fancy plans. Simplified business processes give more responsibility to private contractors for quality control. Preliminary engineering costs, those related to design of the project, are lower. Construction engineering costs are also substantially reduced. But it takes the third element of a preventive maintenance program, dedicated funding, before any long-term savings can be realized. Dedicated funding requires a strong commitment to the philosophy of preventive maintenance, making the choice to preserve relatively new roads with the right treatment at the right time. One of the problems in getting this program started was with the district engineers. They would say, why are we spending money on a relatively good payment when we've got terrible payments that need to be reconstructed? This is a little bit of biting the bullet and spending the money on preventing problems rather than six to eight times more to reconstruct or rehabilitate it after the problem becomes serious. It has to have a high level of support from the top management and also a high level of financial support. And it must be substantial and it must be continuous if we're going to preserve the tremendous investment we have in our capital system. Having made the commitment to preserve their pavements, lead states have found that preventive maintenance allows managers to achieve maximum benefit from available funds and to gain greater control over future network conditions and funding requirements. Long-term support and financial commitment are the keys to success. Georgia has supported this philosophy since the early 1970s. We spend approximately 70 to 80 million dollars a year on preventive maintenance. Our citizens are reaping the financial benefits of this commitment. Compared to rebuilding a road, studies have shown that for every dollar spent to extend payment life, savings of six dollars can be realized. Preventive maintenance adds five to ten years of life to an existing pavement. Taking into consideration the cost per year for each year of added life, preventive maintenance projects are at least six times more cost effective than rehabilitation or reconstruction projects. We found by a recent study that for each dollar we invested in preventive maintenance, the return on extending payment life was ten dollars. That's a ten to one replacement ratio of the original first 70 million dollars that Michigan invested. Our return on extending payment life is about 700 million dollars. This has been very, very important. What that demonstrates is that without spending the first dollar on preventive maintenance, six to ten times the expenditure would be required to reconstruct and rehabilitate to the same pavement surface condition. The benefits of preventive maintenance accrue not only to highway departments but more importantly to highway users. The motoring public and freight carriers enjoy higher pavement quality for an extended period of time, stretching their fuel taxes over the longer term for greater convenience and a smoother ride. The public has come to expect a lot of smooth roads and that's exactly what we're giving them with our pavement management and preventive maintenance program. Between 1972 and 1996, there's been a 300% improvement in the ride quality on Georgia's asphalt pavements through preventive maintenance. Since the start of our concrete restoration program, 20 years ago this movement of our concrete pavements on the interstates has improved by 200%. It takes the discipline, the focus on it. It takes the support of management. It takes the support of pavement design engineers, the policy makers, legislators and the public that you're going to focus on preventing the problem. Extending payment life is key. Ultimately, preventive maintenance will move Pennsylvania's highway system into the next century. We remain committed to providing the best preventive maintenance procedures to our highways and with maintenance first as our underlying philosophy, Pennsylvania's highway system indeed has a bright future. Preventive maintenance is a very important tool in the successful management of our highway asset. It is crucial for true system preservation.