After noticing deteriorating road conditions in West Windsor (despite the doubling of our road-repair budget) in 2018, I attended the Rutgers Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation and took three courses pertaining to pavement management.
I learned that we could slow our road deterioration trend with a pavement preservation program, wherein we could maintain our roads on an early schedule at 5-10% of the potential later repavement cost.
In fact, over the past 20 years, various pavement preservation programs have been successfully implemented in our state, county and neighboring township roads (Hopewell Township, Pennington Borough and Plainsboro Township), yielding substantial savings for taxpayers. I have since been advocating this program to our township engineers, department of public works crew, township administration and residents.
I’m thrilled to share that, this past June we initiated the pavement preservation effort in West Windsor by microsurfacing Marian Drive and Dinsmore Lane.
Microsurfacing is a pavement preservation method that coats the road surface with a layer of asphalt mixed with finely-crushed stones. It extends the roads lifetime for 5-7 years while costing only 10% of later repaving. With these road pavement preservation efforts in place, we now can afford to maintain all of West Windsor’s 124 miles of paved roads every two years.
In a few years, we will catch up on our road repair backlog and return to our prior road repair budget of less than $1 million per year (the budget now is $2 million). Furthermore, our residents can begin to save an average potential of $300 per year vehicle repair costs which are caused by poor road conditions.
Yan Mei Wang
Wang is a candidate running for West Windsor Council.
