Highland Road Study Open House Review

On May 23rd the city held an open house to review the outcome of a recent road evaluation study we commissioned. Below are copies of the poster boards which were on display along with some short comments.

I wrote a post a couple of years ago on roads and the the previous road study entitled “Road Maintenance and Your Dollars”. It includes links to the following three articles which serve as excellent primers on road maintenance and repair:

• "Pavement Condition Index (PCI) 101", describes the rating system used to identify "the maintenance and rehabilitation needs of roads and help ensure that road maintenance budgets are spent wisely."
• "Pavement Preservation Stretches Ailing Road Budgets" discusses some of the road maintenance options which help preserve roads and reduce the cost of maintaining them.
• "Micro Surfacing Overcomes Road Failure Challenges", talks about one of the treatments used by Highland to maintain roads.

The map below contains preliminary recommendations from PEPG (the engineering firm we hired to evaluate our roads) for Highland road work over the next several years. If you click on it a larger version will come up and you can check out the recommended treatment for “bad” roads in Highland. The good news relative to this re-evaluation of our roads is that the estimated repair cost is about 1/3 of the 2011 report.

The slide below highlights the process that used used to evaluate the roads.

Here is a review of what was looked at (600 cores from 203 road segments) and how much money may have been saved compared to the previous road study recommendations.

This diagram provides a synopsis of the prioritization strategy used to determine which roads get fixed when.

Core samples and what they told us about the condition of Highland’s roads.

Types of road conditions and the repair work required.

Road preservation options. Highland typically uses HA5 for residential roads (a microsurface product) and chip seal for busy roads (collectors).

Structural repair options for roads with significant damage (D & F). The cost of the road work may be less than 50% of total due to costs associated with traffic flow and other costs.