The analysis focuses on Pennsylvania's highway maintenance organization in its 67 counties and the cost of five maintenance activities common to all counties: manual patching, mechanical patching, shoulder repair, surface treatment, and snowplowing. In this analysis those counties and groups of counties that produce these activities at either very high or very low total costs relative to one another will be identified. Operational and environmental factors that cause maintenance costs to vary from county to county will be used in multiple regression techniques. Based on the comprehensive nature of the variables used to explain variation in maintenance costs, inferences are made about the relative efficiency of county maintenance organizations according to actual total costs compared to those predicted by the regression equations. These equations were based on data from 1976. The primary source of operational data was the highway maintenance management system developed for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. The study compares counties that produce unusually high-or low-cost maintenance and gives possible reasons for unexplained cost variations by examining operational characteristics. On-site management studies are recommended in order to identify areas for efficiency and cost savings.(Author)