2005 Report Card on America's Infrastructure
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) publishes a biennial report card on the condition of US infrastructure including roads. In 2001 ASCE assigned a grade of D+ to the condition of US roads. In 2003 they reported that the trend for the condition of US roads was downward, and in 2005 the ASCE revised the grade to D. The 2005 Report Card on America's Infrastructure reported that poor roads cost $275 per motorist. That's $54 Billion per year. US motorists spend 3.5 billion hours a year stuck in traffic. That is a $63 billion a year hit to the economy. Even more importantly, poor roads are dangerous. There are more than 43,000 fatalities on US roadways every year. The FHWA reports that outdated and substandard road and bridge design, pavement conditions, and safety features are factors in 30% of all fatal highway accidents.
To me this makes it clear that this is a critical problem and that one of the key requirements for maintaining a national highway and road system is the ability to track the condition, traffic, maintenance history and other key parameters in order to prioritize maintenance of a highway system.
National Highway Authority of India (NHAI)
The NHAI is a relatively young organization, but it has already managed the construction of significant part of the Golden Quadrilateral, India's equivalent of the US Interstate Highway System. NHAI is an autonomous organization responsible not only for the development, but also the maintenance of national highways in India. In a forward looking decision, the NHAI decided to develop a road information system, called appropriately RIS to track and monitor the condition of the National Highway system.
RIS (Road Information System)
RIS is a web-based system that integrates a linear referencing system for tracking the condition of pavement and geospatial data and analysis. RIS was developed using Oracle Spatial and MapGuide. NHAI has just deployed RIS (www.nhai-ris.org). Iinitially it will manage about 20,000 km of national highways. It is planned to add an additional 45,000 km in the future, so that ultimately RIS will manage over 65,000 km of India’s national highways system. RIS is a comprehensive highway management system which includes ten subsystems including asset management, traffic, pavement, environment, bridges, tolls, accidents, ad-hoc spatial queries, and HDM-4, which is an economic modelling tool. The users of RIS are intended to include ministries of the Central and State Governments, financial institutions, highway contractors, toll companies, truck operators, state police, real estate developers, city managers, academic and research Institutes, and the general public. This is a remarkable system in the range and amount of information and the analytical functionality that is integrated in one site. It is worth your while to take a look at it.
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