Brazeau County Road Study

Tagish Engineering was engaged to complete a full assessment of Brazeau County’s road network (1,040 kms) and the development of a database for asset management and future capital budget planning. The County’s road network consists of two main road surfaces types, gravel and asphalt that include both rural and urban settings. To complete the assessment, the road network was broken down into one-mile segments which correlated with the County’s GIS information for easy tracking and updating.  A variety of inspection criteria was developed with the County to accurately categorize each road segment’s condition. These are shown on the right.   The evaluation forms utilized a 1-5 scale, ranking each evaluation criteria based on its condition. These forms were developed digitally which allowed the field evaluators to collect information in a more convenient, organized way. Additionally, it minimized data transfer errors during the development of the database and allowed time for a more in-depth data analysis process to be completed.

The field evaluations were completed within a tight timeframe in order to review the entire road network under the same conditions.  Following this, the database was developed that generated three different score for each road segment; an Evaluation Score, a Priority Score and a Total Score. The Evaluation Score calculates an average of the different evaluation criteria that was collected. The Priority Score considers a variety of influencing factors that help determine a roads overall importance across the entire road network. Some of these influencing factors included traffic counts, proximity to recreational destinations, potential for economic development and connectivity to the provincial highway network. The Total Score then combined both the Evaluation Score and Priority Score to give each road segment an overall score. During Tagish’s analysis it was identified that the database was producing poor recommendations as acceptable quality roads were being identified for immediate rehabilitation because of their high Priority Score. To correct this, Tagish was able to develop and calibrate a decision tree model that provided more accurate recommendations for the County based on different scenario calculations.  This project was highly successfully, providing the County with an excellent tool for future planning and management of their road network.