Escalating costs have scaled back construction of new highways. The current emphasis is on better maintenance of existing roadways.

But if a project under way on Route 22 between Murrysville, Westmoreland County, and Monroeville, Allegheny County, proves successful, the day could come when the project is a basis for shifting some money to new construction that today would have been required for maintenance.

The project in question, a combined venture of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration and the University of Pittsburgh, will use 400 sensors embedded in a new section of Route 22 to provide information on how the highway responds to temperature, precipitation and weight loads.

The data will either validate the correctness of current road-construction practices or provide recommendations on changes to concrete design and placement practices in order to get more wear from the pavement. The odds are that at least a few changes to the way things are done now will be suggested by the study findings.

According to Julie Vandenbossche, a Pitt civil engineering professor who is overseeing the project, "Nobody else has ever done anything of this kind to this magnitude."

Dan Dawood, PennDOT's chief pavement engineer, said the project would give highway officials what he described as a good forensic tool.

"This will measure the stresses a pavement is going through and will give us a good idea for what works," he said.

During the course of the $300,000 project, every 15 minutes the embedded sensors will record data that are put into a database.

From that data, PennDOT hopes to be able to ensure more wear from pavement in the years ahead.

"If we can extend that life cycle, that is just going to help us use tax dollars more efficiently and save us money in the long run," one Penn-DOT official pointed out.

But if the project is the basis for savings nationally, those savings could eventually lead to more available money for new construction.

Obviously, the benefits of the study won't be available immediately, but there will be the opportunity for benefits over the long run.

It is to be hoped that someday the savings realized will help in resolving some of this county's extensive roads needs.

The current pavement design standard has been in use for four or five decades. On that basis alone, a study like the one on Route 22 is overdue, but was impossible without the technology that exists today.