Making Road Funding Work for Communities
As the old adage, often credited to Benjamin Franklin, says “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”. Road agencies in Michigan (MDOT, counties, cities and villages) are set to begin receiving increased transportation funding in 2017. It is now more important than ever for these agencies to have a long-term plan to invest those funds where they will get the biggest bang for their buck. With a little bit of investigation and planning, road agencies can develop a plan that targets projects where the work is the most cost-effective and has measurable future goals.
For municipal road agencies, the first step in the process is to have their road network rated. This is done by raters who have been trained by the Michigan Transportation Asset Management Council to perform PASER ratings, a 1-10 rating system that assigns a rating to each segment (typically blocks) of roadways in their community. This data is collected while driving using GPS-connected software and then imported into a computer program called Roadsoft GIS. This software is provided to the community at no cost. Once the rating information is obtained, it can be used to make color coded maps of the community’s roads showing the ratings. Roadsoft also generates charts and reports that can be very useful.
It is beneficial to have color coded maps and charts showing the condition of a community’s roads. However, the information needs to be incorporated into a plan to use current and future funds in a cost-effective way in order to be put to its full use. This often includes changing the way that the community considers projects from a “worst first” approach to a “mix of fixes”.
A Transportation Asset Management (TAM) Plan determines various methods of road construction and selects projects that fit into each method. It is well understood that road construction becomes far costlier as the condition of the road worsens. For example, it can cost several times more for a community to reconstruct a portion of roadway than to simply mill and resurface it. However, if the appropriate repair for the road conditions is complete reconstruction, then the resurfacing work will not last as long as it should. Imagine that you have a car with a transmission that is failing. Would you expect that changing the transmission fluid would fix it? It might buy you some time, but you are probably going to need a rebuilt transmission before long, so you won’t get much value for the transmission fluid service. Similarly, we shouldn’t expect that a maintenance activity like minor resurfacing is going to correct problems that need major reconstruction.
Employing a “mix of fixes” means that we don’t just wait until roads need to be reconstructed. We identify those roads that can still be saved and apply more cost-effective rehabilitation methods to them. While this often requires letting some of the worst roads go longer without repair, it is critical to stop the cycle of deterioration that allowed them to get to that point in the first place.
A typical TAM project selection process would take the available funding and identify projects where a maintenance fix (i.e. 1-1/2-inch thick mill and resurface) can be applied to segments with a PASER of 5 or 6 and select those projects first. Projects with a PASER of 3 or 4 requiring heavy rehabilitation (i.e. milling and resurfacing 3-inches thick with base repairs, or similar) would be selected next. The lowest priority roads are those with a PASER of less than 3. These roads will require complete reconstruction, which can be 3 times the cost of a maintenance repair.
The Roadsoft program can also model how long each type of repair should last based on historic data when the appropriate repair is selected. This allows us to model different scenarios and how their road conditions will change over time. A typical scenario is to model what the condition will be in 10 years at current funding levels. Another scenario might be to model how a possible road millage could affect the conditions over the same 10 years. The various scenarios can be used to determine the optimum funding levels for the community. From this, the community sets goals for the road system and begins tracking progress toward the goals. In order to track goals and the overall condition of the system, most communities also update their PASER ratings on a regular interval, typically every 2 to 3 years.
The value that creation of a TAM plan brings to a community is very high. It is difficult to make funding decisions when the best information is not at hand. Creating and following through on a TAM plan is the best way to ensure that a community’s road investments are cost-effective, transparent, and will give them the best long-term return.
