Selection Process

Better Streets Waco

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Selection Process

The City of Waco’s Pavement Management Program performs an annual review that identifies which city streets should receive specific applications to lengthen the life of the street surface. These city streets are selected by conducting a pavement surface inspection and calculating an overall pavement condition index rating.

City council asked the Public Works Department to provide fundamentally reliable data to support the specific selection of streets identified annually for consideration, and to create the template for balancing funding allocations per year — and now they have it. While the City’s legacy database system rating was only updated once every other year, Public Works is now leveraging real-time asset condition, work resources, and data to formulate decisions utilizing a software program called Cartegraph.

Cartegraph models pavement condition and how it deteriorates over time. These prediction models can be used to predict pavement condition for a number of different proposed treatments. Through the degradation curve algorithms built into Cartegraph, Public Works can now prepare a comprehensive street preventive maintenance and repair program that optimizes the available funding to improve the street system condition rating to the maximum extent possible. This system allows us to predict and plan cost efficient street projects for much longer terms (five, ten, twenty years) providing City Management with the ability to evaluate funding mechanisms and scenarios. More importantly, we’re able to address the needs of the pavement before it becomes a very costly investment.

The goal of Waco’s Program is to create an overall plan that will support revitalizing our complete network to achieve and maintain a state of relatively good condition and prevent streets from falling into such a state of disrepair that they must be reconstructed. Preserving a street through a surface seal or similar treatment is four to five times more cost effective than waiting to repair a street until after it requires reconstruction. The following criteria are the basis used by City staff to select streets for preservation or rehabilitation:

  1. Engineering-based real time data that identifies the “best value” street needs related to maintenance through various preservation and rehabilitation strategies.
  2. Geographic distribution throughout the community that ensures all areas of the City receive benefits from the Program.
  3. Citizen input on bond-funded project selection and other improvements included in the program.

"We’re no longer guessing—we’re making educated real time decisions.” – Jim Reed, Public Works Capital Program Manager

Need more Info? Contact Us!

Please call the City’s Engineering Department at (254) 750-5440.
Or email us here.