Proper evaluation of pavement conditions provides important decision-support to implement preventative rehabilitation. Traditional method for pavement inspection relies on human observation that has low-efficiency and is subjective to errors. More recent tool for pavement distress inspection utilizes digital video and image analyses to record and identify the pavement surface conditions. This significantly increased the inspection efficiency and reliability. However, the video based system requires large storage space and extensive computation for image processing. It is also difficult to automate the pavement rating. This paper describes the use of recent data acquisition hardware to develop a vibration-based system for preliminary evaluation of pavement conditions. In analogy to the video record which looks at the surface of the pavement, the vibration-based system feels the ground conditions based on mechanical responses of the testing vehicle. The interactions of the ground and vehicle can be described by a model where vehicle is under random force excitations. The distresses of the pavement, including the cracks and surface rutting, impose impacting forces on the vehicle. The frequency and magnitude of the forces are dependent on the extent and magnitude of pavement distresses. On the other hand, the pavement surface conditions can be estimated from the recorded responses of the testing vehicle when driving on the pavement. A testing system was set up and data were collected to validate the measurement concept. Analyses of the testing data indicate that there is a good correlation between vibration responses and the pavement conditions. Factors such as the driving speed and the transition of vehicle motion were investigated. The vibration-based pavement evaluation system described in this paper has the advantage of small storage requirement, cost-effective and amenable for automatic real-time data processing. While this system does not provide the complete details of distress characteristics as by video-based system, it can be an inexpensive tool for routine inspections to provide preliminary evaluation of pavement conditions.