RELATING ROAD ROUGHNESS TO HUMAN DISCOMFORT AND HEALTH IMPACT

The International Roughness Index is the choice parameter of most road engineers for describing pavement surface roughness. This paper recognizes that the IRI seems to ignore the affect of the effects of road roughness on humans. Discussed is the use of a laser profiler, commonly used for road surface surveing, for trying other measures of roughness. Raw data were stored so that other models could be tried including horizontal acceleration. A comparison was then made to the instrumented test vehicle test data. A discussion follows about vehicle simulation model versus generic measures for pavement management use. Also, some suggestions are made for a ride quality index adjusted to human aspects.