| road manager
Managing Municipal Streets
Funding, traffic congestion, partnering, and using new technology are
some of the major issues ahead for those who manage municipal streets.
by Ruth W.
Stidger, Editor-in-Chief
Money, the first key to successfully dealing with these problems, may
be the most critical issue city street managers face.
 In California, like many other areas of the country, local street and
road funding falls short. Bay Area Street Talk, from the Metropolitan
Transportation Commission says that their long-term federal, state, and
local funding for city streets will fall by about $2.6 billion or 22.6%.
Reduced local and other tax revenues hold responsibility for the
shortfall in most cities as the recession slows, but has yet to retreat.
 In the Bay Area, road maintenance and operations monies take a back
seat to transit-related spending, with 14% of the current Regional
Transportation Plan allotted for roads and 63% dedicated to transit
system-related maintenance, rehab, and operations.
Boosting the bucks
If you face municipal street funding problems, too, there are several
ways to increase income and make the best use of the money you do receive.
1. Use a pavement management program. A well-designed plan can help
prove what you need to spend when you approach the city council, the state
department of transportation, or the Federal Highway Administration. It
can also provide alternative preventive maintenance formulas that can save
considerable money over a period of several years.
2. Create a long-term plan. Your road maintenance plan should be at
least five-years long. Major metropolitan areas need multiple plans; one-,
three-, five-, 10-, and 25-year plans, for example.
3. Make use of technology transfer information available from LTAP
centers and hire your own pavement management experts to help predict road
and maintenance needs. These consultants can help you obtain maximum state
and federal funding, grants, and so on.
4. Input evaluations or contractor performance in your pavement
management system. Do this not just immediately following a project, but
at regular intervals over the street’s life. This will help guide future
choices.
5. Switch to performance-guaranteed contracts for work when possible.
6. Lobby city and county administrators for needed funds, using
pavement management software to prove the need.
7. Form a solid working relationship with pavement management
coordinators, engineers, and contractors. Teamwork often leads to
cost-saving ideas.
Better planning
Canadian cities share U.S. problems with a lack of money for street
maintenance. One report estimates that although Canadian cities spend $15
billion a year or more on maintaining and rehabilitating infrastructure,
they would need to shell out $44 billion to return their bridges, roads,
and other infrastructure to an acceptable condition.
Decision-making software can help improve planning to take advantage of
the funds that are available. PAVER, an offshoot of the U.S. Army
Construction Engineering Research Laboratory’s original engineered
management system, is commonly used by municipalities and has been refined
to be more effective than earlier versions.
Use this software to decide on budgetary needs, such as appropriate
funding for maintenance, rather than using the standard rules of thumb of
3 to 4% of capital replacement value.
Installation, Maintenance Prioritization, Analysis, and Coordination
Tools — IMPACT — is another CREL project meant to help identify and
manage infrastructure repairs via multi-year plans.
Civil Infrastructure Technology — CITY — supports street system
decision making. It was first implemented in Ft. Gordon, Georgia four
years ago.
This program lets city street managers or engineers use their Internet
browsers to submit work orders, to view maps and plans of existing
infrastructure, and to archive infrastructure details.
Most cities use some form of Geographical Information System to manage
buried utility details, road network data, and so on.
Cities in Kansas can tie into the state GIS, which includes maps,
charts, and other useful data.
Cities use several asset management programs. Facility Condition
Information Systems, for instance, stores details and designs of a road,
street, or bridge.
Facility Equipment Maintenance System software can help keep your fleet
up and running economically.
A Backlog and Funding Projection Model projects work loads and funding.
For more information on these three programs, go to www.idirect.net/ame_ot.htm.
GeoPlan is a city-oriented software package with a roads and pavement
module. It can help automate operations, point you toward using crews more
efficiently, and help in decision making. For more information, go to www.rpt.com/GeoRoads.htm.
Maintenance 5.0 is a maintenance management system for municipal
operations. A crew card/time sheet mechanism can record data by activity,
accomplishment, or work order. Costs can be analyzed to compare
effectiveness of city crews versus outsourced work to private contractors,
check department or contractor productivity, and similar work. Go to
www.cmsinc.org/maintain/productivity.htm.
Partnering
 Many kinds of partnering can help you manage streets. For instance, a
city can take on snow plowing of a state road within city limits for extra
funding, keeping crews and equipment working a greater percentage of the
time and keeping the needed money coming in.
Smaller cities can team together to hire a pavement management system
engineer they couldn’t afford separately. They can also share a PMS
system, a fleet, and work crews under some conditions; primarily when they
are geographically near enough to each other.
In Washington, D.C., the city partnered with the U.S. Department of
Transportation and VMS, a contractor, to maintain, improve, and preserve
75 miles of key roadways in the District of Columbia.
The $70-million contract covers 344 lane-miles of pavement, 118
bridges, 1,950 drainage catch basins, four minor tunnels, 108,270 feet of
guardrail, and 51 impact attenuators. The term of the contractor is five
years. Funding is split 80% from the U.S. DOT and 20% from the District of
Columbia.
The FHWA helped develop the contract.
The safety situation
Managing municipal streets includes safety management, too. Usually
this means congestion management.
 A safety management system is required for all public roads, including
city streets. Accident and traffic data must be collected and pedestrian
counts, enforcement activities, and bicycle use should be included.
Use of such a system, along with a pavement management system and a
bridge management system, is required to be eligible for federal funding
at any level — including city streets.
Intersections provide special safety concerns with many having multiple
access points, pedestrian crossings, and variable signage. An article on
intersection management will be published in the July, 2002 issue of
Better Roads.
The best safety and congestion management techniques at intersections
include:
1. Traffic signal timing synchronization, including an all-red overlap
to help deal with red-light runners.
2. Use of high-occupancy-vehicle lanes where appropriate.
3. Street widening where appropriate and feasible.
4. Limiting utility and other construction during heavily traveled
hours.
5. Use of cameras to reduce red-light running, since police enforcement
is usually too costly.
6. Use of cameras to monitor and change traffic-signal timing depending
on the volumes of traffic. Columbus, Ohio, for instance began using such a
system more than 25 years ago.
Safety via street design provides an area to investigate. While traffic
speed bumps get kudos in some areas, other cities say they are dangerous.
Traffic calming designs may be more effective. Here, center dividers,
which may be landscaped, help channel drivers in specific directions and
slow speed.
Roundabouts, used in Europe, can help avoid the stop-start dangers of
some intersections, letting drivers enter an intersection and circle until they can safely exit.
Photos courtesy of the City of Columbus, Ohio
Transportation Division and City & County of Denver Public Works.
Denver Automates Condition Collection
The city and county of Denver Public Works recently began using a new
technology that allows the mapping of the conditions of street curbs,
gutters, ramps, inlets, and other aspects of infrastructure. It uses
voice-recognition technology combined with Global Positioning to help the
city more efficiently manage and repair infrastructure. A geographic
information system map will help the city locate, inventory, and
prioritize the maintenance and repair.
University of Colorado at Denver, Department of Civil Engineering,
interns visit areas throughout the city using the new technology to
collect and qualify infrastructure assets. They wear headsets to use the
system.
The Public Works Department, through a contract with Datria Systems,
Inc., acquired the VoCarta Field application for use by its City
Engineering and Street Department.
Datria’s VoCarta field application allows for the rapid and accurate
collection of data using speaker-independent voice recognition combined
with a geographical positioning system.
To use the system, the city data collectors describe what they are
seeing into a head-worn microphone connected to a PDA and the GPS
receiver. The software automatically translates the user’s voice,
capturing locational information and any comments relating to the road or
other condition in addition to the GPS data.
By using speech recognition, there is an increase of data-collection
speed and accuracy approaching five times that of traditional
data-collection methods. The system also reduces the training requirement
for rolling out a data-collection system and increases the safety of the
data collectors by letting them work in a hands-free and eyes-up
environment.
The collected data integrates directly with Denver’s pavement
management system.
The Finnish Way
Tired of maintaining streets or roads for a handful of users? Counties
with lots of towns too small to manage a program alone may want to
consider the way Finland does it.
The Scandinavian country has 46,800 miles of public roads, 14,400 miles
of city streets, and 168,000 miles of private roads.
Little-used, small-town, or rural roads become cooperative-owned roads.
A Private Roads Act requires the cooperative to stipulate right-of-way,
ownership, and the formula for distributing maintenance costs among road
users and adjoining property users.
Generally, the municipality pays about 15% of the costs, the federal
Finnish government pays about 45%, and the remaining costs are divided
among coop members who benefit most from the streets and roads.
Even in larger cities, Finns have a choice of how to pay when it comes
to snow removal on the street — scoop it themselves to the middle of the
street for the length of their property or pay a fee to the city to do it.
The city sets the fee, which most property owners pay rather than doing
the work themselves.
Reprinted from Better Roads Magazine
June 2002 |
