Service Life Assessment of Existing Highway Bridges with No Planned Regular Inspections

Abstract

Safety of a highway infrastructure system depends very much on the proper maintenance of bridges. The level of required maintenance is, typically, determined through a series of regular field inspections with the guidance of safety–economy trade-off. In Turkey, bridge maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation are currently performed on an as-needed basis. Time-dependent reliability analysis cannot be utilized for Turkish bridges for the time being since the majority of the bridges are either not regularly inspected or not inspected at all. The purpose of this paper is to propose a simple method to assess the remaining service life of a bridge by defining a relationship between its current condition rating and its age by evaluating a set of bridges at different ages. In a case study, 28 bridges were inspected for the first time to assess the average life expectancy. The average life of a bridge was predicted to be