The West Virginia Division of Highways (WVDOH) paved 1,170 miles of Mountain State roadway during the 2024 paving season that is just now ending. That’s enough roadway to drive from Charleston to Lubbock, Texas or Winnipeg, Canada.

“We’ve had a banner year for paving,” said Transportation Secretary Jimmy Wriston, P.E. “It’s a testament to our data-driven approach. It’s proof that it works.”

“When you invest in your infrastructure and you do it wisely, you take a data-driven approach, you do the right thing at the right time and you do it holistically, the whole system gets better and that’s better for everybody,” Wriston said.

In 2019, Governor Jim Justice met with Division of Highways county administrators from around the state to kick off the Secondary Roads Initiative, empowering workers with the equipment and training they needed to get the job done. While Roads to Prosperity focused on big, regionally significant projects long stalled due to underfunding, the Secondary Roads Initiative was a call to action to get back to WVDOH’s maintenance roots on rural roads.

The WVDOH relies on contractors and its own work crews to pave West Virginia’s roads.

In 2020, the agency bought its own paving machines and began training WVDOH crews to use them. Using its own crews to run its own paving machines allows the WVDOH to concentrate on smaller roads and pave roads that contractors may be too busy to take on.

In 2024, WVDOH paving crews paved 241 miles of roadway, freeing up contractors to pave nearly 1,000 miles of Mountain State highway.

Total paving costs for the season topped $235 million, through a combination of federal and state funding. Supplemental budget appropriations approved by the West Virginia Legislature the past several years have allowed the WVDOH to pave thousands of miles of highway that might not otherwise be paved.

Depending on a road’s condition, the WVDOH has a long-term plan for when to patch and when to repave. In addition to clearing branches away from roadways to allow sunlight in to dry the roads, and proper ditch clearing and mowing to keep water off of roads to begin with, it’s part of a coordinated approach to make roadways last as long as possible.

“It’s going back to our roots, taking care of the core issues on the highways so that we can get to paving these roads at the right time, so they last,” Wriston said. “This is how you maintain roads.”