Abstract
FERIC was asked by its members to determine the most economical balance between road-maintenance costs and transportation costs. The current report focuses on the impact of road-maintenance levels on travel speed or cycle time for the forestry operation studied. In general, travel speed remained relatively constant until an upper threshold of road roughness was exceeded, and thus any additional grading provides little benefit in terms of speed. Future reports will look at the potential economic impact of paving forest roads and the impact of road roughness on fuel consumption.