A Comparison of Connected-Vehicle Roughness and Traditional Pavement Condition Index

Accurate, scalable pavement condition monitoring is essential for effective asset management, yet traditional methods of collecting metrics like the International Roughness Index (IRI), Pavement Condition Index (PCI), and Pavement Surface Evaluation and Rating (PASER) can be inefficient, expensive, and subjective. Recent efforts by Original Equipment Manufacturers have introduced crowdsourced approaches that estimate IRI at scale using connected vehicles (CVs). This study analyzes one month of CV-estimated IRI (IRICVe) data and compares it with manually collected PCI data from Marion County, Indiana, in 2024. The study includes four roadway classes: primary arterial, secondary arterial, primary collector, and local street, with 562, 147, 426, and 2402 centerline miles of data, respectively. IRICVe coverage was nearly complete for arterial and collector roads (93–100%) but was limited for local streets (37%). Threshold optimization revealed that the “needs maintenance” IRI category (IRI > 170 in/mi) correlates most strongly with PCI values below 50. The study found that 68%, 65%, 70%, and 59% of the roadway segments had PCI and IRI classifications in agreement. Spatial and categorical comparisons suggest some systematic biases between the metrics across roadway types, reflecting how they measure different dimensions of pavement condition. The results demonstrate near-term applications of IRICVe data for quality control in PCI-based asset management and support practical guidelines for integrating complementary pavement assessment metrics.