Management of pavement assets starts already during the design of a pavement and its construction. By means of examples it will be shown that designing a pavement with too narrow lanes and an insufficient cross section can result in unnecessary early failures requiring maintenance to be done at a far too early moment in time especially when far too less attention is given to a proper investigation of the subgrade soil, which might have undesired characteristics, and insufficient attention is given to moisture control and drainage. Such incidents are often triggered by the desire to reduce the construction costs because the available funding for building the road seems to be insufficient. Such pavements are not only "not durable" but they are also "not sustainable" since the precious and scarce resources are not used in the right way.