Improving Data Quality for Pavement Management System

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) has developed a pavement management StreetSaver program with more than 400 users in the United States. MTC uses the program to evaluate street and road condition and perform maintenance needs assessments for the 109 cities and counties in the San Francisco Bay Area. Quality pavement condition survey data is a critical component of a pavement management system. MTC has augmented a new quality acceptance (QA) program as part of its Quality Data Management Plan in 2013. The QA program is geared toward making sure consultants hired by MTC for data collection can provide quality data in a consistent manner. The objectives of the QA program are to provide consistent pavement distress identification, improve data quality, avoid untrained pavement condition raters, while providing industry standards and accountability. The QA program contains a Rater Certification Program that ensures good quality data by using certified and trained technicians for the PMS; hiring a third party and neutral institution to audit the contractors' quality control plan; and verifying the data collected by consultants and checking data collected against pavement deterioration models and curves used in the PMS database. The process provides feedback to the consultants' quality control plans and significantly improved the quality of the PMS data collected. The MTC's data quality assurance experience is expected to benefit other agencies that are using any pavement management systems.