Citywide Pavement & Sidewalk Management Program

The City of Chelsea has approximately 48 centerline miles of City-owned streets within its jurisdiction. Previously, the City has programmed paving projects based on resident input or if the Public Works Department visually noticed a street in poor condition.

The Public Works Department was looking to develop a pavement and sidewalk asset management program, to better allocate City funds for future capital improvement projects.

Benesch was contracted to develop and implement a pavement and sidewalk asset management program, driven by visual inspections of City infrastructure and the City’s goals and priorities. Benesch developed digital data collection forms to document visual inspections, as well as an Excel tool to rank all City-owned streets by their individual Operations & Performance Scores (OPS) to ultimately create a prioritized list of all City streets. The OPS was designed by Benesch to incorporate several data driven components and subcomponents and utilize weighted averages to remove any subjectivity from the streets chosen for improvements.

Benesch worked closely with the City to ensure their goals were taken into account. For example, under the ‘Functionality’ component, local roads were prioritized over arterials and collectors in the Route System category. This was done due to City concern that local roads would never rise up the priority list since arterials and collectors rate higher in the Average Annual Daily Traffic category of the ‘Essentiality’ component.

Ultimately, the City was highly satisfied with the implementation of the OPS and prioritization ranking of all City-owned streets.