This paper presents concepts and considerations associated with defining highway quality and its implications, particularly for highway maintenance. Factors that affect highway quality are reviewed, and the roles and needs of various organizational elements are discussed. These elements, which range from national and statewide policy decisions to maintenance activities in the field, emphasize the need for a consistent scale of quality assessment and presentation techniques relevant to highway user impacts, financial and economic policy decisions, program scheduling and management, and maintenance activity monitoring. Definitions of micro-and macro-quality and their impacts are addressed, and quantitative relationships between new, threshold, and critical quality levels are illustrated and related to maintenance impacts in order to provide a context and framework for establishing maintenance workload, performance, budget, and cost models. Key issues in highway quality related to maintenance impacts are explored, and initial descriptions of maintenance impacts are related to threshold and critical quality levels to assist in developing an integrated approach to user cost and impact analysis.(Author)