Abstract Manager

The City of Toronto maintains a road network of about 5,600 centreline-kilometres of road and over 300 centreline-kilometres of laneways. The City's transportation infrastructure has been constructed, maintained, and enhanced over more than 100 years. Transportation Services - Asset Management Unit maintains the inventory and collects data on a regular basis for this extensive network of roadways that varies in function from laneways to low-volume residential roadways to expressways. Asset management is a strategic approach to the optimal allocation of resources for the management, operation, maintenance, and preservation of transportation infrastructure.

Data collection, data management and data integration are essential parts of transportation infrastructure asset management. High-quality data is a key contributor to the success of an effective and efficient asset management tool. Since 2017, the City adopted the use of automated pavement condition surveying over manual condition surveying methods. Data collected through automated processes not only ensured quality data but also significantly reduced data collection time. A complete street approach was also implemented as part of the automated data collection, which included other asset data within the road right of way including curb, sidewalk, median, traffic control devices, bike lane, traffic signals, road markings and so on. Other assets' data inventory consists of five key attributes including identification, location, physical properties, condition assessment and reference records. All data for the innovative pioneering complete street approach were collected simultaneously and shared geo-locational and linear referencing ties.

The existence and easy access to pavement quality and other transportation asset data will help provide several economic, technological, and safety benefits to the City.  Some immediate benefits include cost savings and safety related to removing the need for many roadside site visits.  Other benefits are more deeply rooted and involve the consistency of data collection, completeness of asset inventories, and providing the most concise and up-to-date baseline for system analysis or optimization. 

Pavement condition and other asset data will play an important role in City's transportation infrastructure management system and contribute towards the development of optimum strategies for maintaining assets in serviceable condition over a given period of time for the least cost.  At the network level, the collected data can be utilized for capital work needs identification and programming of annual and multi-year capital investments. Since the collected pavement condition and other asset data are available at ten-metre intervals, the data can also be utilized to develop maintenance plans. Considering the City's ageing transportation infrastructure, this updated data inventory has been proven useful to develop a resilient transportation infrastructure asset management system.