Data and Process - Independent & Objective

Transportation Asset Management is a strategic and systematic process of operating, maintaining, upgrading, and expanding physical assets effectively throughout their lifecycle. It focuses on business and engineering practices for resource allocation and utilization, with the objective of better decision making based upon quality information and well-defined objectives.

The Michigan Transportation Asset Management Council has selected the PASER rating system as the statewide standard of pavement condition reporting.

The Transportation Asset Management Council requested that the information gathered in the federal aid road surveys be reported using the categories of GOOD, FAIR, and POOR. The following graphics illustrate this for the years 2014-2021.

PAVEMENT SURFACE EVALUATION AND RATING (PASER)

The PASER scale is a 1-10 rating system for road pavement condition developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Transportation Information Center. PASER uses visual inspection to evaluate pavement surface conditions. When assessed correctly, PASER ratings provide a basis for comparing the quality of roadway segments. The PASER assessment method does not require measurements of individual distresses, and thus PASER ratings cannot be disaggregated into measurements of specific distress types. The advantage to this method is that roads may be assessed quickly, possibly even by "windshield survey." A primary disadvantage is that because PASER ratings cannot be disaggregated into component distress data, the metric cannot be used in mechanistic-empirical transportation asset management programs.