Timothy Colling

Collecting Decision Support System Data Through Remote Sensing of Unpaved Roads

Unpaved roads make up roughly 33% of the road system within the United States and are vitally important to rural communities for transport of people and goods. Effective asset management of unpaved roads requires frequent inspections to determine the roads’ condition and the appropriate preventive maintenance or rehabilitation. The major challenge with managing unpaved roads is low-cost collection of condition data that are compatible with a decision support system (DSS). The advent of cheap, reliable remote-sensing platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles along with the development of commercial off-the-shelf image analysis algorithms provides a revolutionary opportunity to overcome these data volume and efficiency issues. By taking advantage of these technological leaps, a market-ready system to detect unpaved road distress data compatible with a DSS was developed. The system uses aerial imagery that can be collected from a remote-controlled helicopter or manned fixed-wing aircraft to create a three-dimensional model of sensed road segments. Condition information on potholes, ruts, washboarding, loss of crown, and float aggregate berms is then detected and characterized to determine the extent and severity of the distress. Once detection and analysis are complete, the data are imported into a DSS based on a geographic information system (Road-soft) for use by road managers to prioritize preventive maintenance and rehabilitation efforts.

Aging infrastructure creates opportunities for cost‐efficient restoration of aquatic ecosystem connectivity

A hallmark of industrialization is the construction of dams for water management and roads for transportation, leading to fragmentation of aquatic ecosystems. Many nations are striving to address both maintenance backlogs and mitigation of environmental impacts as their infrastructure ages. Here, we test whether accounting for road repair needs could offer opportunities to boost conservation efficiency by piggybacking connectivity restoration projects on infrastructure maintenance. Using optimization models to align fish passage restoration sites with likely road repair priorities, we find potential increases in conservation return-on-investment ranging from 17% to 25%. Importantly, these gains occur without compromising infrastructure or conservation priorities; simply communicating openly about objectives and candidate sites enables greater accomplishment at current funding levels. Society embraces both reliable roads and thriving fisheries, so overcoming this coordination challenge should be feasible. Given deferred maintenance crises for many types of infrastructure, there could be widespread opportunities to enhance the cost effectiveness of conservation investments by coordinating with infrastructure renewal efforts.

Assessment of Traffic Safety Training for Local Agency Technical Staff and Elected and Appointed Officials

This paper provides an overview of a study that investigated the impact of traffic safety training for two specific audiences in local agencies in Michigan: technical staff and elected and appointed officials. The impact of the training was assessed by measuring changes in attitudes and behavior with regard to traffic safety after both groups attended specialized training. The study was limited to local agencies in Michigan as a way to reduce the number of variables that could influence the outcome. Learning assessments, workshop evaluations, follow-up surveys, and innovative ethnographic interview techniques were used to verify learning and to detect changes in attitude and behavior. The study revealed significant positive attitudinal and behavior changes in both technical staff and elected and appointed officials that were attributed to what they learned in the training. The study indicates that there are significant benefits to traffic safety on local roads when local agency staff and elected and appointed officials are appropriately trained.