Governor Wolf Outlines Plan to Invest Additional $2.1 Billion for Highways and Bridges Through New Road MaP Program

Governor Wolf Outlines Plan to Invest Additional $2.1 Billion for Highways
and Bridges Through New Road MaP Program

2/28/2017-HARRISBURG

Today, Governor Tom Wolf announced plans for the Pennsylvania Department of

Transportation (PennDOT) to invest more than $2 billion in roadway
maintenance
and highway and bridge capital projects over the next 10 years through its
new
Road Maintenance and Preservation (Road MaP) program.

"We've made significant progress on our roadway and bridge needs and the
Road
MaP program will amplify our efforts statewide," said Governor Wolf. "We're

bringing an even bigger focus to our interstates and to the lower-volume
roads
where many Pennsylvanians live and work."

The investments are being made possible due to legislative action in 2016
which
caps the expenditures from the Motor License Fund going toward the State
Police
budget beginning with the 2018-19 budget and concluding with the 2027-28
budget. The program will see an additional estimated $63 million in the
2017-18
state fiscal year through Governor Wolf's budget proposal of a $25 per
capita
fee for municipalities with exclusive State Police enforcement coverage.

Of the capital-project investments, $500 million will be allocated to an
Interstate preservation and reconstruction program, bringing that total
program, begun in 2016, to $1 billion over the next 10 years. Another $600
million will go toward rehabilitation and reconstruction needs identified
through the department's district and regional planning efforts.

Another piece of Road MaP is aggressively addressing relatively low-volume
roads with a reinvigorated initiative to use recycled asphalt to preserve
and
upgrade the condition of these roads. Recycled Asphalt Paving (RAP), which
repurposes materials from projects onto other roadways by mixing ground
millings with oil, allows the department to pave less-traveled roads that
otherwise wouldn't be paved, or to reinforce roadway shoulders.

RAP is an environmentally conscious method that saves the need to purchase
new
material, stretching dollars to impact more miles of secondary roadways. In

PennDOT's northwest region where RAP is being deployed, they estimate
roughly
$5.4 million in annual savings due to RAP usage. RAP will be an increased
focus
with PennDOT forces in Armstrong and Berks counties in 2017, with expanded
usage occurring in 2018.

"Our county staff have aggressively managed their budgets over the past
decade
to maximize maintenance dollars and Road MaP will allow us to better
complement
the vital work of our private-sector partners to improve our transportation

system," PennDOT Secretary Leslie S. Richards said.

The savings achieved through county staff's innovation and efficiency
efforts
have laid the groundwork for Road MaP to make the biggest impact with
department and private-sector work. Roughly 75 percent of the department's
total highway and bridge investments go to the private sector and Road
MaP's
maintenance component ensures that department forces and industry partners
can
continue and expand vital maintenance improvements.

Road MaP addresses large needs on the 40,000 PennDOT-maintained miles.
Specifically, the Interstate program will address the issue of more than
half
of the state's Interstates being out of cycle for reconstruction, which
should
be considered every 40 years. Of the 2,691 department-maintained Interstate

bridges, nearly 40 percent have exceeded their original 50-year design life
and
44 of them are older than 65 years.

In addition, of the roughly 18,000 miles of PennDOT-owned, low-volume
roadways,
24 percent haven't had structural resurfacing in more than 20 years. Of the

PennDOT-maintained roads that aren't Interstates or on the National Highway

System, 27 percent are rated as "poor" on the International Roughness
Index,
which rates pavement smoothness.

The department estimates that Interstate reconstruction costs roughly $2.6
million per lane mile, or $5.2 million if the segment mile of Interstate
has
two lanes. Resurfacing one mile of two lanes of interstate in one direction
of
travel costs roughly $1 million. On lower-volume roads, per-mile costs are
roughly $24,700 to seal coat, $101,400 to resurface and $910,000 to
rehabilitate.

"We're well aware that many Pennsylvanians are dealing with very old roads
that
sorely need repairs, and Road MaP is one way that we're going to fix our
connections within communities and to other states," Richards said. "With
this
initiative we're telling our customers that we're using these new
investments
to better maintain and preserve our massive roadway system – the
fifth-largest
in the country."

Road MaP, with its additional resources making more contracts and
department
maintenance work possible, means that all maintenance projects listed in
Act
89's Decade of Investment will be completed by 2028. As of late February,
more
than 70 percent of projects accelerated or made possible by Act 89 were
completed, are underway, or are on the department's four or 12 year plans.
The
projects are viewable at www.projects.penndot.gov.

More information on Road MaP is available at www.penndot.gov on the "Act 89

Transportation Plan" page.

MEDIA CONTACTS:
JJ Abbott, Governor's Office, 717.783.1116
Erin Waters-Trasatt, PennDOT, 717.783.8800

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