Abstract
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) awarded a contractor a three-year contract to collect, analyze, and report pavement condition of the state highway system for 2018 and 2019 using automated pavement condition survey (APCS). The contract covers 12 Caltrans districts with roughly 52,000 lane miles of on-system roadways and 6,000 lane miles of off-system roadways. Before investing significant resources on statewide APCS data collection, Caltrans and the contractor initiated a pilot study. The purpose is to establish a workable process for data quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA), making sure the data collected closely reflect the field condition. The pilot study was conducted on selected routes in Caltrans District 12. The study included a total of 113 lane miles of roadway, representing roughly 5% of the total lane miles in the district. Of these lane miles, 69 lane miles are asphalt pavements and 44 lane miles are jointed plain concrete pavements. The developed data QC/QA process functioned very well. With this process, the contractor was responsible for performing the QC of the APCS data before submitting to Caltrans. Caltrans performed data QA, which included data completeness check; image review; field review and office verification; data upload into Caltrans pavement management system, and year-by-year data consistency check. The joint effort has resolved many data inconsistency issues caused either by interpretation or software issues. The data quality was thus well improved. It is recommended that this QC/QA process be implemented for all APCS data collections in California.
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