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ROI of Evolving Your Road Network Data Management Practice

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Return on Investment of Evolving Your Road Network Data Management Practice Esri Canada White Paper 3 Introduction Combining linear and spatial referencing to locate assets and related data on linear transportation networks, specifically roads, and transforming the organizational data management practices to leverage this philosophy results in wider data integration, better application of business intelligence, and less data duplication. Ultimately this allows the transportation authority to provide a better-integrated, smarter and more efficient transportation system to the public. This whitepaper identifies the return on investment for a municipal government of making this data management philosophy change. Most Canadian municipalities use a digital data management system to store information that represents their road network. Many tools are available to do this, including relational databases, purpose-built infrastructure asset management systems, or more commonly, a geographic information system (GIS). Physical roads require regular maintenance, the funding for which is sourced through public taxes. For many municipalities there are rarely enough funds to maintain the whole network in perfect condition. Therefore, the road authority charged with maintaining the physical road network must make prioritized decisions about where and when to spend these dollars to maintain a given level of service. This practice is known as transportation asset management. Some road authorities have good asset management practices while some have room to improve, but all must use some sort of data management system to apply their asset management practices, which is why many municipalities not only have a transportation infrastructure asset management system, but also tend to use it as their foundational data repository. Unfortunately, this is not a feasible approach. Traditional asset management systems work well when the assets in question are discrete "things" such as fire hydrants, salt sheds, or sidewalk slabs. However, this traditional approach of discrete asset management falls apart when attempting to manage a continuous linear asset, such as a roadway. This is because roads are very complex in terms of their physical management, and various "things" that need to be identified on the road may not exist in any single place. Instead they begin at some point along the road and end somewhere else. To complicate matters, different "things" can have lengths that overlap each other. As an example, consider the surface condition of a roadway. For the first 20 metres beyond an intersection the condition could be classified as "good", then the next 48 metres it could be "fair", then the next 102 metres it could be "good". This same stretch of road is composed of four lanes of traffic for the first 90 metres and then two lanes for the remaining 80 metres.

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