Abstract

Lexington, in central Kentucky, is the second largest city in the state. Local government is by a mayor and council of elected representatives from twelve districts and three at-large representatives. The Department of Public Works headed by a Commissioner, who reports to the mayor and city-county council, administers the streets and roads system.

The street and road network in Lexington consists of approximately 720 centerline miles. Approximately 100 miles are rural in nature and 620 miles are urban. Approximately 95 percent are bituminous surfaced roads; a majority of the remainder is constructed of portland cement concrete.

Increasing costs for constructing and maintaining the street and road network was a stimulus to implement a systematic pavement and road surface management system. Available alternatives were reviewed, and it was decided to maximize in-house resources of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government. Meetings with public works officials were used to establish criteria for implementation of a management program: (a) program for visual condition survey of pavements, (b) procedure(s) to determine structural deficiencies for critical pavements identified in the visual condition survey, and (c) utilization of the above information to estimate rehabilitation strategies and their associated costs.

The paper describes and documents three phases of implementation of a pavement and road surface management system. Phase I included development of a system-wide inventory of pavements and a pavement condition rating system for both flexible and rigid pavements. Phase II dealt with the modifications to a microcomputer program to process pavement condition ratings for ranking pavements on the basis of need and also to estimate pavement maintenance and rehabilitation costs. Phase III included administrative and training activities necessary for implementation of the pavement management program. Training generally addressed three areas:

  1. collection of pavement condition and distress information,
  2. operation of the microcomputer program for data processing and analyses, and
  3. interpretation and utilization of results of the analyses.

Finally, the paper describes current research and development relating to refinements and modifications for the Lexington situation.

Report Date

7-1987

Report Number

UKTRP-87-18

Digital Object Identifier

http://dx.doi.org/10.13023/KTC.RR.1987.18

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