StreetSaver Blog

The Rocky Mountain West Pavement Preservation Partnership is a regional forum of pavement professionals from State and Provincial Agencies, Contractors, Suppliers, Academia, Local and Federal Government Officials, all working together to take advantage of the synergy to be gained from sharing information and identifying common issues for further investigation. It provides a forum to share and publicize information describing improvements in research, design, specifications, materials and construction practices, and to promote the benefits of Pavement Preservation through education and application.

The Heritage Group opened their new Innovation Center and Research Laboratory in Indianapolis in August 2017. While the building and lab is a state-of-the-art facility, the associated roads and parking lots were also designed and built with state-of-the-practice innovation, features and engineering prowess to ensure optimal performance.

With new reports and information on the condition of Tupelo’s local street system, city leaders have an important task ahead of them in determining a long-term plan for maintaining and repairing a vital resource while also being diligent stewards of taxpayer dollars.

The City of Benicia is responsible for the management, repair, and maintenance of approximately 196 lane miles of pavement and is valued at $111.5 million. As of 2016, the City's average Pavement Condition Index (PCI) is 54. The PCI is a measurement of pavement grade or condition and ranges from 0 (failed) to 100 (new).

FHWA, in cooperation with the AASHTO Joint Technical Committee on Pavements, TRB Committee AFD10, Pavement Management Systems, and AFD20, Pavement Condition Evaluation, is hosting a series of quarterly webinars on pavement management. The purpose of the webinars is to provide a forum for education and communication for pavement management practitioners.

Iowa State University's Halil Ceylan picked up his smartphone, opened up an app and called up the remote controls for the first full-scale test slabs of electrically conductive concrete installed at an American airport. When a winter storm approaches, Ceylan can use that app to turn on the heated pavement system and, thanks to real-time video capability, watch as snow and ice melts away.

As part of the effort to support pavement preservation, Asphalt Institute is announcing that 12 of their recorded webinars on topics related to PP will be offered for free. The speakers on the webinars are experienced industry professionals or members of AI’s staff. We hope these recorded webinars will be a valuable training resource for agency and industry groups that want to learn more about emulsified asphalt as well as design and construction of emulsified asphalt applications and pavement preservation treatments.

The City of Elk Grove is responsible for the maintenance of nearly 1,150 lane miles of roadway with over 90 million square feet of pavement. The goal of the Pavement Management Program is to maintain the city’s pavement in the best condition possible given the funding available. Each year, preventive maintenance treatments are performed on various City streets. These treatment projects are intended to extend the life of the pavement and avoid more costly repair or replacement of streets.

TRB will conduct a webinar on Wednesday, October 11, 2017, from 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM ET that provides guidance to state and municipal roadway authorities on how they may improve the prediction capabilities of their pavement management systems by incorporating recent advances in performance prediction models. The state-of-the-art of developing performance models has advanced through a more comprehensive study of statistical and computational techniques. However, some of these advances have not made their way into industry practice. This webinar will provide an overview of the available tools for developing and validating pavement performance models and examples of successful model development and implementation by state and municipal agencies.

I love seeing transportation agencies become heroes. A legendary source of their superpowers: the data generated by pavement management program (PMP) software. Each month, I see more agencies discovering the advantages of a PMP, especially backed by state-of-the-art technology like StreetSaver®. Interest in StreetSaver® is growing—and for good reason.

Cities and counties should give themselves a pat on the back with the passage of Senate Bill 1 (SB1) in April. This bill will raise gas taxes and vehicle fees by $5.2 billion a year to pay for California’s crumbling roads, highways, and bridges for the next decade. Cities and counties will receive $1.5 billion annually to fix local streets and roads.

When clients say, “We’re not getting the best value from our pavement repairs,” I suggest crunching the numbers to see what they reveal. We often find counter intuitive results that can help them squeeze 30% more value from their budgets.

Neighbors said the owner is using the shells to build the access road to his farm. But they say he used unwashed clams.

In cooperation with eleven road construction companies, the University of Twente is working on improving asphalt roads in the Netherlands. By using new technology during the asphalt paving process, the resulting road quality is 10 to 30 percent higher.

StreetSaver will be present at the 5th Urban Street Symposium in May 21-24, 2017, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The roadway network is an important part of the nation’s transportation system, but it also contributes heavily to greenhouse gas emissions. A paper published this month in the Journal of Cleaner Production by researchers with the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) introduces a way to reduce emissions across a roadway network by using big data to identify specific pavement sections where improvements will have the greatest impact.

Roller Compacted Concrete pavement is best described as a zero slump concrete that is placed with standard or high-density paving equipment and consolidated/compacted using steel-drum or rubber-tired rollers to achieve a durable, wear resistant surface.

A consultant that studied Hollister's streets to determine 2016 traffic mitigation fees said the city must spend a minimum of $4 million annually -- $3 million more than it currently does -- just to maintain streets in their present condition.

The City of Santa Rosa has approximately 500 miles of streets, making it the city with the fourth highest street mileage in the Bay Area (only San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco have more.) It would cost over $1.1 billion to replace the pavement of Santa Rosa’s entire street network.

2017 arrives with many uncertainties, along with a new president. There is, however, a consensus in infrastructure investment. So at the minimum, systems preservation will be in the spot light. I have made one and only one New Year resolution this year – getting more local agencies to subscribe to pavement preservation.