During the past ten years Charlotte has experienced explosive population growth, adding close to 200,000 drivers, pedestrians and cyclists to city streets. Last year, Charlotte drivers logged more than 20 million miles, creating stress on an already crowded road system.
To better maintain its roads the City of Charlotte is exploring innovative technology solutions for more efficient road maintenance.
Traditional inspection methods are labor intensive
The process of inspecting roads and scheduling road maintenance traditionally requires significant human and financial resources as city employees or contractors must physically drive each city street to monitor, assess and document conditions.
Charlotte has traditionally worked with contractors for road assessment. This process involved contracting for a van outfitted with video and camera equipment and two people that drove throughout the city taking photos and video taping road conditions.
The data is assessed at an office by a reviewer who provides a street rating. In addition to being time consuming and expensive, a shortcoming of this method is that the rating is based on one person’s perspective from a remote location.
Creating a better way
To overcome the challenges and expenses associated with traditional road inspection and assessment, the Charlotte Department of Transportation is working with GoodRoads, a local startup company whose mission is to change the way cities manage roads through innovation and technology.
The startup has developed a small, low-cost device that can attach to any city vehicle and collect images of road damage as well as data related to ride roughness and location.
Traditional methods can take six months to produce a street rating, GoodRoads can produce a rating in one day.
Each image is processed by GoodRoads artificial intelligence system, which is trained to identify distresses in the road. The system uses this data to assign a rating to individual segments.
These distresses and ratings are geo-referenced using the GPS built in to the device. This data is funneled into the Good Roads app, where it can be easily referenced by road managers.
With GoodRoads’ artificial intelligence system, a computer rates the street conditions, making the process more consistent and accurate.
“Traditional methods can take six months to produce a street rating,” says Charlie Jones, deputy street superintendent for the Charlotte Department of Transportation. “GoodRoads can produce a rating in one day.”
Road conditions monitored by the Good Roads device include road cracking and utility patches—approximately 3,800 new patches each year in Charlotte—and overall ride roughness.
For the Charlotte pilot project, GoodRoads mounted its devices on Charlotte Department of Transportation trucks that collected road condition data while out on their normal routes.
During the course of the three-month pilot, GoodRoads inspected 142 unique miles of streets,” says Chris Sunde, founder and CEO of GoodRoads. “We are currently working with the city to analyze the data and map out next steps.”
Additional features that could be added to the technology include monitoring and assessing street signs and pavement markings.
The pilot project process has yielded benefits to both the city and the company. The city benefits from being able to influence the technology features being developed while GoodRoads benefits from being able to confidently develop features that customers want and need.
The relationship also fits with the city’s “smart city” goals of using technology to improve people’s lives as well as its goal of supporting local innovators and entrepreneurs.
“We need to do more for our small businesses,” says Charlotte city council representative, Tariq Bokhari. “That’s why I am so supportive of the public private partnership labs where innovators, developers and entrepreneurs sit side by side to share ideas and experiences and develop new technologies that create jobs and make people’s lives better.”
