Development of Pavement Management System for National Park Service Roads and Parkways

The National Park Service (NPS) road system of Park Roads and Parkways (PRP) includes an excess of 8,000 miles of paved and unpaved roads. Recently, NPS and the Federal Lands Highway Program (FLHP) took an initiative to develop a Pavement Management System to manage the PRP network (PRP PMS), using the pavement condition data collected in two data collection cycles between 1997 and 2004. PRP PMS is a customized version of Stantec’s Highway Pavement Management Application (HPMA™). It includes customized models that can provide NPS with the tools necessary to conduct various pavement management activities, including both preventive maintenance and rehabilitation activities within the framework of pavement preservation. PRP PMS represented a unique challenge during both the development and the implementation phases of the system. The PRP road network is a discontinuous nationwide network of primarily low volume roads and parking areas. It is spread across the entire nation with different climatic conditions, subgrade soil conditions, and traffic levels. In addition, the amount of historic data, both in terms of performance data and construction history data, available for the development of the analysis models was very limited. Furthermore, the traffic patterns on these park roads were different from neighboring state roads, since no commercial trucks are allowed on the majority of the PRP network. This paper presents an overview of the development of the PRP PMS in terms of the challenges faced to develop the system, the development and customization of the analysis models in the system, and the PMS network analysis using the pavement preservation approach of combining both preventive maintenance and pavement rehabilitation activities, as opposed to rehabilitation activities only through a worst first approach.