Abstract Manager

Municipalities across Ontario collectively pave Millions of tonnes of asphalt annually with different paving investment strategies, yet there’s no standardized method to compare their resurfacing and paving investment relative to their funding capacity, population, and network size. Existing performance indicators, such as pavement condition indices, provide useful snapshots of network health but do not capture a municipality’s resurfacing output per dollar of available revenue. This paper introduces the Municipal Paving Investment index (MPI), a benchmarking tool that relates annual paving tonnage to the municipal tax levy normalized per the road network size.

Using data compiled in the 2025 Ontario Paving Report, combined with financial metrics from the provincially reported Ontario Financial Information Returns, the MPI index normalizes resurfacing activity and enables meaningful cross-municipal comparisons regardless of size, population, or network scale. The paper outlines the data collection process, methodological considerations, limitations, and formulae used to compute the indicator. Followed by a comparative analysis of a large sample of Ontario municipalities. Results are expected to highlight differences in investment intensity across the municipalities, comparing rural municipalities to urban centres, and steady growth municipalities to high-growth ones to identify strategic opportunities for enhanced pavement funding.

The MPI index provides a helpful framework and decision-support tool for municipal engineers, asset managers, and policymakers. It can help identify under-investment, support budget requests, benchmark performance against peers, and evaluate the feasibility of different funding strategies on lifecycle reinvestment needs. The indicator represents a scalable national framework for linking transportation asset renewal to municipal fiscal capacity.