Pavement Management System Implementation for Asphalt, Gravel and Native Roads

Nearly one-third of the land area of the United States is Federally owned and administered. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is authorized to assist its Federal Agency partners, including the US Fish & Wildlife Service, to perform engineering and related services for the development and improvement of these highways. As part of a pilot project, the Eastern Federal Lands Highway Division (EFLHD) retained Stantec Consulting (Stantec) to investigate the feasibility of implementing a pavement management system for the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service Regions 2 & 6 refuge roads, where the majority of the road surfaces were either gravel or native/primitive. The project team had previously implemented pavement management systems for other federal land road networks, including the National Park Service and the Forest Service. However, this was their first implementation of a pavement management system for unsurfaced pavement structures. A network-level pavement condition survey had previously been conducted on all the road segments. Initial prediction models and decision trees were developed based on engineering experience and input from the project team. Two separate ground truth trips covering 10 refuges in five States were conducted to verify the models and proposed treatment options. It was found that the performance of unpaved roads was dramatically influenced by precipitation and maintenance practices. As such, the team developed time-based maintenance and rehabilitation decision models (rather than performance-based decision models) as well as best practices for routine maintenance for different environmental zones based on field observations.