Surveyors study street, sidewalk conditions in Fayetteville

Infrastructure Management Services LLC (IMS) recently started the second phase of a project to complete an inventory and analysis of streets and sidewalks in the city of Fayetteville.

The city in 2018 approved a $206,000 contract with the Tempe, Ariz.-based company for the project. The first phase of the project measured the structural condition of the pavement and its ability to carry traffic loads, such as weight, speed and number of vehicles, according to a news release.

The second phase includes measuring pavement roughness, rutting, cracking and other surface distresses of the city’s nearly 390 miles of streets and sidewalks. IMS operates a van equipped with a laser road surface tester to measure the roads as a worker drives the van on them. Three field technicians operate the laser equipment while the van travels at 15 mph, driving roadways at least once during the survey work. The technicians also will collect roadway and right-of-way data from four digital video cameras and GPS lasers. The work should be completed in March, and the overall project is expected to be completed in spring 2019.

City engineer Chris Brown previously said the city will use the data to develop a plan to preserve existing streets. “For the most part, we have only used asphalt overlays as our pavement maintenance method, but there are multiple other solutions that may be applied, depending on the pavement condition,” Brown said. “The goal is to catch the pavements at the point in their life where is it most advantageous to implement maintenance: Too soon and you are spending money unnecessarily, and if you wait too long, the pavement condition deteriorates to the point that much more expensive treatments are needed.”

The project is expected to provide for a more analytical approach to pavement preservation and allow the city to better use its money to keep its streets in top condition, Brown said. This will the first time the city has completed a project like this. The pavement inventory is expected to be completed again, as it’s typically good for about five years, but the sidewalk inventory won’t need to be completed again because the city will update its inventory when new sidewalks are installed. Also, the surface condition review will be completed again but likely not the pavement structure analysis.