City officials have put into place a Five Year Plan for paving improvement and preventative maintenance. This simplifies and quantifies the resurfacing of roads during any specific year. It allows for budget planning and insures that all roads receive the appropriate attention at the appropriate time.
Charts and Tables Corresponding to the spreadsheet
The PAVER pavement managing system is an Army Corp of Engineers program that was released to the public sector through a technology transfer. The system strives to indicate the condition of any street or paved area by examining a small section of a street and rating every defect in that sample section. A PAVER examination will count or measure such things as potholes, rutting, weathering, block cracking, alligator cracking, longitudinal/traverse cracking, heaving, bleeding, etc. There are 19 asphalt pavement defect types that are identified by photographic standard so the street rating will be comparable to any other city using this system. The size and relative seriousness of the defects are used to determine the Pavement Condition Index or PCI. PCI is a number between 0 and 100 where 100 is perfect. The PCI is broken into seven descriptive categories for ease of comparison. These are Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor, Very Poor, and Failed.
Since the beginning of the program in Carlsbad in June 2001, we have inspected every city street in at least one location. The more locations that are inspected, the better the accuracy of the PCI and more representative it will be of the area. Also, some streets must be broken into smaller segment because earlier repairs or heavy use have made certain areas not representative. The inspection information was used to produce a Five Year Plan to improve city streets dramatically. The Five Year Plan strives to improve all roads with a PCI rating of Failed, Very Poor, or Poor. Also, those streets are grouped into neighborhoods so the repairs can be done more efficiently.
The funding level to make the Five Year Plan happen are more than has historically been available. Supplemental funding from sources such as the New Mexico Department of Transportation, State Legislature Grants, and Federal TEA-21 have been requested where appropriate, but there is no guarantee that any funding will be granted. The Five Year Plan includes basic information on every street like location, width, and segment length. The Pavement Condition Index (PCI) and its related category indicate the condition relative to all other streets in the city. The planned improvement column indicates which year, the type of improvement, and how much the repairs will costs. This Five Year Plan is a living document and will constantly change as new inspections are completed and as streets are being refurbished. Therefore, the plan will be updated each year to verify which streets and neighborhoods have been completed or are to be completed.