PMS

Like heeding the word of higher-ups often is, using a pavement management system (PMS) has been one of those things many local agencies did largely because they had to, only to find later that it’s actually a good idea.

The higher-up in this case is the federal government, which initially made having some sort of PMS in place a requirement for getting ISTEA funds. The ‘good idea’ part has been the help that such systems have given public works departments, both in better managing their roads and in showing local elected officials where funding is most needed.

Of course, many local agencies were at least familiar with PMS before ISTEA passed in 1991, although they may not have been using a one. For some, the federal legislation pushed them to implement something that could be called a PMS, though not necessarily a sophisticated, computer-based system. Others have looked for ways to upgrade their systems and improve management of roadways.

As Pat Thomas, assistant public works director for Escondido, Calif., puts it, knowing what type of maintenance or rehabilitation to carry out and when, and then completing the work on time are the essential tasks of successful pavement management. For those charged with these tasks, a computer-based PMS combined with surface and subsurface testing can be a valuable tool.

In Escondido, for example, Thomas’s department is using Micro PAVER software provided by APWA to generate ratings of the city’s 280 miles of pavement surfaces, based on data city personnel collect in physical, systematic inspections of roadways.

This PMS was developed in the ’70s by the U.S. Army’s Construction Engineering Research Lab (CERL) and is now offered to public works agencies through APWA.

Before putting its system in place, Escondido’s public works department followed what Thomas calls “pretty much a seat-of-the-pants approach,” keeping a running, hand-written list of road priorities. The department needed to improve on this common, time-honored method.

“[The PMS] has really helped us manage all the information much better,” Thomas says. “We’re able to have a more logical way of deciding where to put our maintenance dollars, and to have the information on an ongoing basis. As we do maintenance work, we’re able to keep track of it by computer, and we can find out what the history of a roadway has been.”

Anaheim, Calif., has also benefited from the use of a PMS, although it has taken some expected fine tuning. In that city, the public works design division is responsible for 184 center-lane miles of arterial highways, while the maintenance division handles local streets, according to Mike Komoto, principle civil engineer.

Anaheim had used a PMS for several years before deciding it was not meeting the city’s needs. Komoto says the software system, provided by the state DOT, was not designed to crunch the numbers for several pavement management options. It only produced a list of priorities for one strategy – total replacement.

That was a major sticking point, since the city was unable to take advantage of one of a PMS’s greatest benefits: System reports that establish priorities for several strategies, including preventive maintenance, can help a city or county keep more of its roads from getting so bad that they need total replacement. Catching a deteriorating stretch of pavement early can stop, say, a $500,000 job from turning into a $2 million one.

“It costs less money to keep good pavement in good condition [than] to replace bad pavement,” saysAPWA’s John MacMullen, who provides support for users of the group’s system. “The concept is to develop a pavement management operation that is preventive-maintenance oriented.

“I’ve never heard of a city or county that has not improved the cost effectiveness of its pavement maintenance operation by installing and running a PMS,” he claims. “It’s infinitely better than just being reactive.”

For Anaheim to take this approach, it needed an upgrade, and obtaining a survey analysis of the entire arterial system was the first step. In 1993, the city hired Infrastructure Management Services, Arlington Heights, Ill., to test its roadways, including non-destructive deflection testing of subsurfaces, and provide a complete base of information. With this base as a starting point, the design division now surveys its roads each year, enters updates on changing conditions, and lets its computers crank out a report rating the city’s pavement.

“We do the annual survey ourselves,” says Komoto. “It doesn’t make sense to contract that out, because our pavement doesn’t change that much.”

The pavement testing firm also provided software that the design division uses to enter the results of the annual survey. Komoto says the maintenance division, responsible for local streets, initially used the APWA system for handling such survey results, but switched to the IMS software last year so that the two divisions would have similar rating schemes.

Although both divisions are now using the same software, they maintain separate systems, since the pavements for which the divisions are responsible are largely affected by different factors. Loading is the key factor for the arterials, while age has the greatest impact on the local streets, according to Komoto.

“We keep them separately, because the local system has to be evaluated on its own merits,” he says.

Also for the sake of getting consistent, meaningful reports from a PMS – apples to apples – Komoto advises using experienced people to survey roadways, and using the same people year after year if possible.

“You’re not going to get good results if you keep changing people every year,” he says. “It’s not going to look the same each year.”

Komoto figures at least 50 percent of local agencies around the country are also doing some sort of pavement management on computers. “They have to be,” he says, “because it’s just too humongous a task to handle all the paperwork (by hand).”

Or, as Paden describes the job of producing reports on priorities from pavement survey data, “This is stuff it would take just an army of people to do.”

It is also stuff that can be of tremendous value when budget decisions are being made. Paden, director of the Oklahoma T2 Center, says that detailed reports logically produced with a PMS often help convince elected officials that the needs claimed by streets and highways divisions are real.

“You can crunch massive amounts of numbers and go into a council (meeting) with two or three options, and let them choose,” he contends. “When councils are faced with cold, hard facts, they will readjust budgets.”

Sam LaConte, for one, has found this to be true. LaConte, street manager for the city of Westminster, Colo., says his department’s PMS has had tremendous benefits and has “paid off in the sense that it has increased our funding through the city council.”

LaConte says the computer-based PMS is a vital tool, though not the only one used in making pavement decisions. The system’s database and reports provide a good starting point, but the department does not strictly follow the system’s recommended priorities. It may have other factors to consider, based on staff knowledge, that are not necessarily part of the computer’s calculations.

In addition, LaConte says he and his staff occasionally find that data from the consultant’s testing is not accurate – all the more reason to keep the human element as part of the mix. Still, the technology is sound, and LaConte looks for it to improve even more and for virtually everyone in the country to be using a computer-based PMS within the next five years.

If officials do shift local budgets with PMS recommendations in mind, it might mean more dollars for pavement needs in general (as in Westminster) as well as a change in the way allocated dollars are spent. A compelling PMS report could show officials that preventive maintenance on Road A is a greater priority than rehabilitation or reconstruction of Road B.

This argument can be a tough sell, at times when ordering major work on a roadway makes more political hay than maintenance less visible to the voters, points out Dave Fluharty of the University of New Hampshire T2 Center.

But PMS reports often move budget debates past these kinds of issues, says Bruce Johnson of IMS. He says that the “biggest thing we hear from clients is that [a PMS] helps remove the politics from street programs,” although he concedes that sometimes “the best information in the world won’t convince the city our county council to tax their people any more.”

Recent versions of PMS software provide a bit more ammunition for that battle, however, by allowing links to GIS databases. Street departments can thus combine pavement condition ratings with color maps to make an even stronger, visual case to elected officials as well as to the public. As the use of GIS in general continues to spread, such links with PMS data are likely to be an area of growth and advances in technology.

MacMullen estimates that probably two dozen PMS packages are available to public works agencies, ranging in sophistication from simple spreadsheet formats to systems that “will practically make you coffee in the morning.” Sources include APWA, state T2 centers and some commercial providers.

No matter what combination of resources agencies use to rate pavements, from contracting the entire process out to simply obtaining software and doing the rest in-house, MacMullen cautions that results can be four or five years away, with the first stages the most difficult.

“There’s a lot more work in the beginning than in the middle or in the sustaining of it,” he says.

But if the work means more dollars, wiser spending and better roads, that’s a lot to recommend it.