High-res cameras, laser scanners survey Waco streets to steer road decisions (2024)

By J.B. SMITH

Big data has come to Waco streets this week.

A van equipped with cameras, laser scanners and vibration monitors is spending several weeks driving the city’s 600-mile street network. As it moves, it collects detailed information on pavement conditions and logs potholes, bumps and cracks big and small.

The city’s contractor for the $450,000 project, Fugro Roadware, will crunch millions of data points and score each street section to help the city prioritize repairs during the next decade.

“This data is invaluable to develop a program for the next 10 years,” city engineering director Octavio Garza said. “It helps us answer questions of how do we plan and program for the next 10 years, where do we spend our money, where do we do reclamation, overlays or seal coating?”

City officials say they are trying to catch up with deteriorating roads, starting with $5 million this budget year for preventive maintenance.

For years, the city has maintained a list of street maintenance priorities based on observations by city engineers of pavement conditions. But Garza said those visual surveys were qualitative and limited in their usefulness.

Shortly after he got here last year, Garza found records showing that 45 miles of road needed surface sealing, 70 miles needed asphalt overlays, and 31 miles needed to be completely reclaimed. But he said those numbers were based on old criteria and probably underestimated the problem.

“I struggled with the age of the manual we were using and how the data was categorized,” Garza said. “These numbers did not reflect what I was seeing.”

$450,000 for survey

At Garza’s urging, Waco City Council agreed to spend $450,000 on the road survey this year, and Garza expects another survey will be needed within three years.

Garza said he expects the investment will pay off in wiser decisions. City engineers will have access to huge data sets and software that can predict how quickly a given street will deteriorate if it is not sealed or overlaid. Garza said it is crucial to catch up with routine maintenance before it is too late.

Reuben Williams, senior project manager at Fugro, said sealing and overlaying streets is the equivalent of getting the oil changed on your car.

“You want to do the little things so that you don’t have a catastrophic failure, and to extend the life of your car as long as possible,” Williams said. “It’s the same with streets. . . . It’s way more expensive to rebuild a road than to do maintenance on it periodically.”

Fugro Roadware has done similar work for cities around the country, including Texas cities such as Georgetown, San Antonio, Pflugerville, San Angelo, Richardson, McKinney and Irving.

The data collection technology includes cameras that face downward to get a high-resolution view of the pavement, along with laser scanners that capture a three-dimensional profile of cracks and holes. Fugro uses the data to score pavement conditions on a scale of 1 to 100.

Those scores are a foundation for street repair priorities, though city officials typically consider other factors, such as traffic counts and revitalization efforts.

“You can’t take the human element out of this,” Williams said. “This isn’t a silver bullet. In the end, some human being has to look at and say, we need to do this project. It’s like a road map.”

Garza said the engineering staff already is shaping up a plan for spending this year’s $5 million preventive maintenance budget. Projects likely will include reclaiming part of Jewell Drive, resurfacing Wooded Acres Drive and Lake Air Drive, and overlaying Sanger Avenue and Franklin Avenue between downtown and Valley Mills Drive, Garza said.

“I think 2016 will be a turning point for Waco managing its streets,” he said. “With increased funding for pavement and striping and having better data and knowledge, I think we will be able to make a lot better decisions about where we put our money.”