Evaluation of Connected Vehicle Pavement Roughness Data for Statewide Needs Assessment

Many agencies use pavement condition assessments such as the Pavement Surface Evaluation and Rating (PASER) and Pavement Condition Index (PCI) to develop localized pavement management programs. However, both techniques involve some subjectivity and inconsistent measurement practices, making it difficult to scale uniformly across all 86 thousand miles of local agency roadway in Indiana’s 92 counties. International Roughness Index (IRI) data is one emerging data source that could address this need. This paper evaluates the feasibility of using Connected Vehicle-estimated IRI (IRICVe) data for long-term statewide pavement monitoring on local roads. The analysis is based on approximately 4.1 billion daily IRICVe records collected over a multi-year study period from connected vehicles operating throughout the state. A modular data processing workflow was developed to clean and process these records and is presented in detail in the paper. The study includes network-level condition comparisons, insights on spatiotemporal trends, and localized segment-level condition monitoring. In 2024, approximately 53% of paved local roads in Indiana had at least one IRICVe observation per year. Coverage varied widely by county: for example, 79% of roads in urban Hamilton County had coverage, but only 14% had coverage in rural Martin County. The findings in this study demonstrate the potential of IRICVe to support local agency pavement asset management by providing cost-effective data-driven insights in near real-time.