The two latest surface transportation authorization bills—Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) and Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act—have required that pavement performance measures be established for the Interstate Highway System (IHS) and the National Highway System (NHS). As a result of their enactment, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) issued a set of final rules to establish pavement performance measures to assess the condition of the pavements on the IHS and the NHS. These rules were issued in 23 CFR Part 490, Subpart C in April 2017.
FHWA undertook the initial Interstate Pavement Condition Sampling study in 2015. This project was completed in 2017 and the relevant data, findings and conclusions are summarized in Interstate Pavement Condition Sampling 1 (2015). FHWA decided to undertake a follow-up research effort. The objectives of this follow-on project were essentially the same as those for the 2015 study (plus some additional investigations), which were:
- Collect a follow-up unbiased dataset for a statistically significant sample of the IHS and produce a report indicating condition on the IHS nationally and in each State where data were collected.
- Further investigate whether or not the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) data is an unbiased representation of pavement condition on the IHS.
- Recommend further improvements to HPMS data collection and reporting to either make HPMS unbiased or improve its precision.
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Pursue additional investigations, including:
- Evaluation of data collected in this project as compared to Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) data.
- Evaluation of the HPMS with the project-collected data.
- Analysis of the temporal effects using multiple data sources.
The map below shows the data collection route for this 7,500 mile, 11 interstates and 34 States data collection effort. The 2015 data collection effort included close to 9,000 miles, 9 interstates and 39 States. The 2018 data collection effort purposely included some of the same interstates and States to enable various additional data analyses.
In accordance with the final rules, the condition of the pavements is determined based on the following four metrics (1) International Roughness Index (IRI), (2) percent cracking, (3) rutting, and/or (4) faulting. The overall condition rating of the IHS and NHS pavements is assigned based on condition rating thresholds stipulated in the final rule. More specifically, the overall condition of the pavement is determined based on the individual metric conditions and thresholds, as follows:
- For asphalt and jointed concrete pavements, the pavement is classified as good condition if all three metrics are in good condition. The pavement is classified as poor condition if two or more of the metrics are in poor condition. All other combination of metric conditions classify a pavement as fair.
- For continuously reinforced concrete pavements (CRCP), if both of the metrics are in good condition, the pavement is classified as good. The pavement is classified as poor if both of the metrics are in poor condition. All other combination of metric conditions classify the pavement as fair.
In turn, based on the condition ratings, the final rule established four pavement performance measures to assess pavement condition as follows: percentage of pavements on the IHS in good and in poor condition and percentage of pavements on the NHS (excluding IHS) in good and in poor condition.
The data set that was generated from this study is included in this feature. It includes:
- Metadata about the data collection process including latitude and longitude, data collection date, speed, air temperature, surface type, construction that impacted data collection, bridges, and lane deviations, etc.
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Data summarized at the hundredth of a mile for the following pavement performance indicators:
- International Roughness Index
- Asphalt concrete cracking
- Portland cement concrete cracking
- Faulting (jointed PCC pavements only)
- Rutting (asphalt concrete pavements only)
- Pavement performance metrics and conditions (Good, Fair and Poor) summarized to the tenth of a mile.
- Good, Fair and Poor indicators nationally for each tenth mile segment as per the pavement performance Final Rules published in 23 CFR Part 490, Subpart C.
The report and the database (including the schema) are linked together. The user is advised to read the report first and then use the database.