Document Library

The nation is facing enormous repair, maintenance, and replacement costs for its aging bridge infrastructure, and this issue is of concern to a broad cross section of public and private interests. A simple-to-use bridge information system is needed by technical and nontechnical users who would like to review detailed information on the condition of the nation's public bridges without recourse to access-restricted and cost-prohibitive proprietary software. The annual National Bridge Inventory (NBI) text files collected from the states over consecutive years and maintained by FHWA constitute a wealth of information on approximately 600,000 public bridges throughout the United States, including information on condition and load ratings, geometry, sufficiency, age, location, functional classification, average daily traffic, improvement costs, inspection frequency, material and design types, historical significance, structural deficiency, and functional obsolescence. This information is of potential significance to a wide variety of end users, including bridge design and maintenance personnel, departments of transportation executive management, cultural and environmental specialists, economic forecasting and financial personnel, and media, commercial interest, and public information officers. As a supplement to a proprietary bridge management system, the New Mexico Department of Transportation developed an independent bridge information software application to process NBI source files and to produce commonly requested formatted reports on various categories of bridge information, including structural deficiency, age, improvement costs, historical significance, and several others. Because the NBI text files are processed into a common database format, custom reports may be easily generated by using simple query tools.

This report presents a level-of-service-based approach to describing performance of Interstate Highway System (IHS) assets. It also provides a template and process that state departments of transportation (DOTs) can use to implement this approach for managing their IHS assets. Well-described levels of service are an effective means for communicating with public officials, highway users, and other stakeholders about asset performance and resources needed to ensure adequate performance. The IHS, the result of a major national investment, is vital to the nation's economy and an increasingly critical contributor to global production and distribution systems, but the system's assets are owned and managed by the states. While the specific measures that define excellent or poor levels of service may vary from one state to another, a consistent framework and measures for IHS levels of service would support benchmarks that DOTs and other responsible agencies can use to assess their Interstate maintenance and preservation needs and management their IHS assets.

The 2010 Road Asset Management Plan (RAMP) reviews the Shetland Island Council’s current status of asset management practices and describes a review process that will take place to update the results of the document on a continuous cycle.

An update to the 2005 Data Integration Primer. The Data Integration Primer aims to provide the basic arguments for data integration, along with a framework for understanding and making the decisions necessary to select a data integration strategy that will work most effectively for your organization.

A report that investigates the role of structural health monitoring in the optimization of bridge management under budget constraints.

A report on development of user-friendly software application for extracting information from National Bridge Inventory (NBI) source files.

A report detailing the development of a network-level pavement roughness prediction model for rehabilitation recommendations.

A document that proposes a pavement rehabilitation project ranking approach using probabilistic long-term performance indicators.

This report presents research on the performance of asphalt pavement preservation activities.

A report on pavement preservation funding and performance in Washington State.

A report that presents a methodological framework to be used as a tool for studying performance goals and their implications in pavement preservation.

This report presents implementation methods for the level-of-service component of performance-based road maintenance contracts.