Surveying streets gets less bumpy in Seguin

SEGUIN, Texas – Streets in poor condition can be a headache for drivers and for the cities keeping tracking of them.

So the city of Seguin was glad to welcome some newer technology last week that makes the process easier. The tracking vehicle uses cameras and lasers to determine a street’s pavement condition index or PCI.

“It can tell us how many roads we can do per year and it’ll show us what those roads should be,” said City Public Works Director John Donnelly. “And then we can deplete from that how we’re going to disseminate the money around the different districts within the city, so we spend our money wisely.”

Before, the city surveyed its streets on foot and manually entered its findings into a database.

“Instead of being a reactive mode and wait until the road starts falling apart or you’ve got a lot of complaints to go out and fix it, the city can now get into a preventive mode to where they’re out ahead of the distress and the problems,” said Scott Gordon, president of Roadway Asset Systems.

The company partnered with ESP to bring in the vehicle, which spent several days in Seguin.

Donnelly said previous surveys have found that the city’s streets have improved markedly over the past few years and this latest survey will help the city take the next step.

“We don’t want to do all the worst streets first. We want to work in the middle so that we can keep the streets that are in the middle at a higher PCI, so we don’t have everything at the failed category,” Donnelly said.

Seguin isn’t the only place where this high-tech data collection is happening. Roadway Asset Services has surveyed other cities, including San Antonio and Austin.

Now that the data has been collected, it will take a few weeks for analysis to be available.

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