The results are paying off. Pavement preservation refers to projects to extend the life of existing pavements through a variety of methods such as cape seals, fog seals and overlays. On its current path, with the pace of paving projects around the state, Wriston predicts the WVDOT will soon be able to shift its focus from catching up to pavement preservation; from catching up to getting ahead.
“We’re at a point now, according to our analytics, our plan, and where we are in our plan, we think over the next three years we’re going to be in that spot to where nearly 90 percent of our paving activities will literally be preservation programs,” Wriston said. “In three short years, we’ll have something worth preserving at that point.”
“We struggled for so long underfunding our roads and bridges that it was difficult even to manage the decline of our roadways,” Wriston said. “That’s literally the position we were in.”
Gov. Jim Justice made a focus on rebuilding the Mountain State’s dilapidated highway system a top priority. With Roads to Prosperity, Gov. Justice asked state voters to approve $2.8 billion in bond sales to fund road and bridge construction in every county in West Virginia. His Secondary Roads Initiative concentrated on repairing and paving smaller rural roads statewide, the roads ordinary West Virginians drive every day.
Along with supplemental budget appropriations requested by the Governor and approved by the West Virginia Legislature, the WVDOT was able to embark on an unprecedented construction and maintenance program that has included the paving of thousands of miles of West Virginia highways. |
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“It’s an incredible achievement that this Department of Transportation has accomplished,” Wriston said. “And they’ve done it together. They’ve done it partnering with industry, with the engineering side, the construction side, our own maintenance side. We’ve all partnered.”
“We have augmented the contractor’s capabilities, while still focusing on those core activities, to get the entire system,” Wriston said, “We’ve taken a systems approach with data driven decision making concepts to get the roads moving in the right direction.”
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West Virginia’s efforts to rebuild its highway system have not gone unnoticed. Earlier in October, the WVDOH swept all three categories in the national Asphalt Pavement Alliance’s Perpetual Pavement Awards competition. The awards recognize sections of highway built to the highest standards and expected to last for decades with normal periodic maintenance.
“It’s really a testament that in three short years, the things we were talking about ten years ago with pavement preservation programs and techniques, we’ll be in a position to start doing that,” Wriston said. “It will be cheaper, it will be more efficient, and we’ll have a highway system we can actually maintain decade after decade, instead of managing the decline of our system decade after decade.”
“That’s been the message of this transportation department,” said Wriston. “Yes, we have a mountain to climb. Yes, the top of that mountain is up there. And we’re moving toward the top of that mountain, but we’re not there yet. We’re still going up, and we’ll always do that, because our work’s never done.”
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