Less than three years after the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission spent $4.5 million to resurface the highway between Monroeville and Irwin, the pavement is deteriorating.

Turnpike crews have patched the 11-mile stretch in more than 100 places in the eastbound lanes alone. Later this year, an outside contractor is supposed to repave the worst stretch in both directions at Milepost 63, near the Harrison City maintenance shed.

"I'm appalled at the condition of the road," said Jerris Weller, of Penn Hills, who travels the toll road almost daily for work in Irwin.

"The road is in as bad of condition as it was before they spent several million dollars. It was breaking up shortly after they finished cutting out the joints and patching them."

Turnpike commission spokesman Bill Capone said engineers characterized the problem as "surface defects" that are more of an eyesore than cause for concern.

"They aren't structural issues where the pavement is failing," he said.

Another spokesman, Joe Agnello, said the road was rated 92 on a scale of 100 during a pavement assessment in October, but the rating doesn't reflect the ravages of this past winter. The next assessment is set for next month.

The contractor, IA Construction Co., of Zelienople, repaired about half of the expansion joints, milled off 1¹/₂ inches of old asphalt and replaced it with an equal thickness of new, recycled asphalt.

Work was done at night, inasmuch as that stretch of turnpike is the busiest in Western Pennsylvania -- about 55,000 vehicles a day in the peak travel month of August, 17 percent of them trucks.

The turnpike paving contract called for a hot asphalt mix called "ID-3" in technical specifications. The contractor used 40,749 tons on the job.

A pavement design guide of the Pennsylvania Asphalt Pavement Association, which represents the asphalt industry, cautions that while the mix was previously approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and is sometimes still produced, "PAPA no longer recommends use of these materials."

The resurfacing between Monroeville and Irwin appears to be the second embarrassment in as many years for the toll road agency.

"Superpave" asphalt used for reconstruction between Mileposts 94 and 99 in a mountainous stretch east of Donegal and predicted to last 10 to 15 years crumbled after only five years. Most of that section was repaved in 2005 at an extra cost of $7.8 million.

Mr. Agnello said engineers attributed difficulty maintaining the stretch between Monroeville and Irwin to a 50-year-old roadbed with poor drainage and original concrete slabs paved over many times. The highway is to be rebuilt from the ground up, and widened to three lanes, at some unspecified time in the future.