Maintainability of highways is an important problem that is considered in the planning steps of a highway development process. A number of asset management systems have been developed to precisely predict maintenance and pavement expenditures for better decision making, But these systems are not helpful in reducing maintenance costs. Optimization of some highway design characteristics in the planning phases may reduce maintenance costs over the life cycle of highway. The formulations for initial and maintenance costs have been developed based on which design variables can be chosen to minimize these costs, focusing on the sideslope in cut and fill sections. Maintenance cost has been represented as a function of sideslope, width of highway cross section, and annual average daily traffic. A real geographic database of between Chung joo and Sang joo city in Choong buk was used and it is presented to investigate the sensitivities of maintenance cost and soil characteristics in selecting alignments. In this study, we present that maintenance cost and soil characteristics are important considerations in alignment optimization.