Abstract Manager

The majority of Ontario’s municipal bridges and culverts that were built in the 1950s and 1960s are quickly approaching the end of their design life. Without the necessary funding, the declining condition of these assets can result in structures with compromised safety and increased maintenance and rehabilitation costs. Municipalities of all sizes are affected by this underinvestment and are required to do more with less to address a $19.1B deficit.

In 1985, Ontario emerged as a leader in bridge safety with the introduction of the Ontario Structure Inspection Manual (OSIM), which standardized detailed visual inspections for all structures over three (3) meters in length. OSIM has been updated on several occasions, most recently in 2018.

The paper focuses on advancements in international best practices and decades of insight and knowledge gained through evaluating thousands of structures that can be used to optimize the OSIM process.

• Changing the inspection frequency of the OSIM cycle time based on the structure's configuration, age and condition
• How the structures are evaluated from cycle to cycle, limiting bias based on a priori knowledge gained from previous inspections.
• Optimizing inspection frequency to focus on elements that have the greatest impact on the Bridge Condition Index (BCI) and overall bridge safety.
• Identifying the factors that give greater insight into the structure's performance and safety.
• Flagging bridge configurations and elements with known inherent vulnerabilities not necessarily connected to the bridge or element condition.
• Modernizing the methods of recording field data to better facilitate data maintenance and post-inspection analysis.
• Opportunities for improvement identified in the Ontario Auditor General’s 2021 report.

The result of this effort, if adopted in the next OSIM edition, would reform the way OSIM inspections are carried out, reestablish Ontario as a leader in the sector, and provide greater detail and clarity on the condition and safety of structures, allowing for better asset management planning, resulting in the savings of millions of dollars.