Developing a Correlation Between the Pavement Condition Ratings Used by Five Federal Lands Management Agencies

The Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Federal Lands Highway works closely with its federal and tribal transportation partners, collectively called Federal Lands Management Agencies (FLMAs). A review of the various pavement condition assessment methods used by five of the FLMAs showed that each one was different and that there was no uniform basis to compare pavement conditions on a national basis. This paper presents the results of a study performed to develop statistical models to crosswalk the paved road condition ratings of the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Land Management. To achieve this objective, two major field studies involving independent condition assessments of several federal lands roads by the FLMA representatives were conducted. The results of the field studies and the subsequent analyses of data demonstrated that the individual rating procedures used by each FLMA could be reasonably crosswalked to the pavement condition index (as specified by the ASTM D6433 standard), allowing for a consistent method of reporting FLMA pavement conditions nationally.