With the passing of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is required to adopt a set of national pavement performance measures for evaluating the condition of the Interstate and National Highway System. In support of this legislation, FHWA considered various data sources. One of those sources was the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) data set, which is the official Federal government source of data on the extent, condition, performance, use, and operating characteristics of the nation's highways.
As a result, the FHWA decided to undertake the research effort entitled Interstate Pavement Condition Sampling, whose objectives were to:
- Collect an unbiased pavement condition baseline data set of a statistically significant sample of the entire Interstate Highway System (IHS) and produce a report indicating the pavement condition on the IHS nationally and in each State where data were collected.
- Determine if HPMS is an unbiased representation of the pavement condition of the IHS.
- Recommend improvements to HPMS data collection and reporting that are necessary to either make HPMS unbiased or improve its precision, in regard to performance management and FHWA's use of HPMS data.
The resulting dataset covered 8,623 miles (18 percent of the total IHS centerline miles), 9 different interstates (15 percent of the total number of named interstate routes), and 39 States and D.C. (80 percent of the States). In addition to those 8,623 miles, another 500 miles of data were collected on the inside lane, 500 miles were collected in the opposite direction of stated data collection, and 500 miles of data were collected for quality control (QC) purposes.
The map below shows the data collection route:
The data set that was generated from this study is included in this feature. It includes:
- Inventory information detailing pavement changes and events (construction, bridges, etc.) information.
- Data summarized at the hundredth of a mile for the following pavement performance indicators:
- International Roughness Index
- Asphalt concrete (AC) cracking
- Portland cement concrete (PCC) cracking
- Faulting (jointed PCC pavements)
- Rutting (for Ac pavements only)
- Pavement performance metrics and conditions (Good, Fair and Poor) summarized to the tenth of a mile.
- Good, Fair and Poor indicators nationally and in each State where data were collected as per the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (as well as using alternate set of thresholds as presented in the report) resulting from the study.
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.