Because of their unique features, current practices for estimating urban and low-speed pavement roughness could lead to inappropriate or misleading data. Make your measurements more accurate. TRB hosted a webinar on Tuesday, March 17, 2020 that described methods for measuring, characterizing, and reporting roughness on urban and low-speed roads. The presenter described longitudinal road profile features, including built-in features and built-in roughness. He also described challenges of accurate road profile data collection. Finally, the presenter examined the use of the International Roughness Index (IRI) as a measure of ride quality, and describe methods of applying IRI on low-travel roadways.

This webinar draws on research from the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Research Report 914: Measuring, Characterizing, and Reporting Pavement Roughness of Low-Speed and Urban Roads.

The slides and a recording of the webinar are available.
Webinar Presenter

• Steve Karamihas, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute

Moderated by: Brian Schleppi, Ohio Department of Transportation

Webinar Outline

1. Urban road profile content
2. Incorporation of additional data
3. Theory of inertial profiling
4. Road profiler operation at low speed and with stops
5. Automatic detection of profile measurement errors
6. IRI and ride quality primer
7. Low-speed roughness index
8. Conclusions regarding data quality management

1. Question and answer session

The first 60 minutes of the webinar will be for presentations and the final 30 minutes will be reserved for audience questions.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this webinar, participants will be able to:

1. Develop a plan for characterizing and reporting roughness on urban and low-speed roadways
2. Apply the IRI algorithm to urban and low-speed roadways that improves correlation to objective measurements of ride quality
3. Analyze assess the accuracy of road profile measurements collected under adverse conditions
4. Measure profile more accurately on urban and low-speed roadways

Professional Development Hour Information

A certificate for 1.5 Professional Development Hours (PDHs) was provided to Professional Engineers (PEs) who register and attend the webinar as an individual. For approved webinars, TRB’s webinar program awards Registered Continuing Education Provider (RCEP) Professional Development Hour (PDH) credits associated with participation only to the registered individual and not to other members of a group that view the webinar together. To receive PDH credits, please register as an individual and sign into the webinar from your personal computer. After doing this, you may join your group in a meeting room. To be eligible for the credits, individuals must remain signed in for the entire webinar, including for any question and answer session following the presentations.