We all know how much potholes are a pain. The wear and tear on our vehicles and the discomfort of hitting a big one. If your street is riddled with unavoidable potholes, it can leave you fuming. We've all experienced it. We also wonder why can’t our cities and towns just get these things fixed? Why does it seem to take ages to get them repaired? Some people go as far as fixing them themselves.

As I learned through working on this project, the management of road assets by municipalities is a monumental task. When you think of the thousands of miles of roads even in a relatively smaller city, the ability to efficiently maintain roadways is a wicked problem to say the least.

Road roughness is a persistent issue that causes discomfort to drivers and passengers, damage to vehicles, and can even lead to accidents. It affects the quality of transportation infrastructure and delaying maintenance can lead to increased costs and greater damage, while performing maintenance too frequently can be wasteful and costly. Moreover, measuring the level of road roughness accurately and efficiently can be difficult, which can result in ineffective maintenance efforts.

Maintenance requires a significant amount of funding and resources, including equipment, materials, and skilled labor. Furthermore, road maintenance is often dependent on the availability of funding from government budgets, which can be limited and subject to competing priorities.

I interviewed a variety of relevant parties at our DOT road commission partners in California and Michigan including executives, directors, engineers, operations and maintenance personal.

The research helped us gather important information around the behaviors, goals, and frustrations to inform persona and feature development.

Through participating in data collection studies and conducting internal GM workshops, I gained insight into the capabilities of our vehicles. GM partnered with Inrix, a leading transportation data analytics company, to study road networks in Washington, D.C. using connected vehicles to collect data on road conditions and safety. Vehicles tested on standard routes where reference measurements of IRI (International Roughness Index) by laser equipment exist. These reference measurements are used to calibrate the measurements for each vehicle model. Roughness measurements from connected vehicles are aggregated in the cloud.

The International Roughness Index (IRI) is used by highway professionals throughout the world as a standard to quantify road surface roughness. The Michigan Transportation Asset Management Council has selected the PASER rating system as the statewide standard of pavement condition reporting. The road roughness index is the weighted average value of the observed measurements of the international roughness index (IRI) for the state

I also worked with our university at DOT partners to access how road condition data is currently planned and collected and the technologies utilized like GIS/GPS, Pavement assessment tools, ASTM (suspension travel) methods, scanning and 3rd party solutions.