Dearborn County Transportation Assessment Complete ... - OKI

ChapterTHREEROADWAY ASSESSMENTOne of the goals of the Dearborn County Transportation Assessment identified the needto “provide an accurate blueprint of the county roadway system to assist inunderstanding the growth of the county and its future needs.” The gathering andanalysis of centerline and roadway attribute data achieves this objective.3.1 DATA GATHERING & EXTRACTIONOne of the first tasks of the project was to complete a Global Information System (GIS)digital centerline map of roadways in the entire county. This task was accomplishedusing data collection vehicles containing eight (8) cameras collecting spatially indexedvideo for all Dearborn County. Each video frame is tagged with precise geographiccoordinates computed with data from an Inertial Motion Unit (IMU) and GlobalPositioning Satellite (GPS) signals to support 360° roadway measurements andcoordinate location extraction.Select attributes of the roadways were also collected during this process. They includedthe number of lanes, the pavement width, the shoulder width, the pavement type, thepavement condition, and existence of pavement markings. Along with roadwayattributes, a sign and guardrail inventory was also completed. All of thesecharacteristics are now associated with the digital GIS centerline map. A completelisting of the all roadway attribute data is contained in the Appendix of this document.3.2 ASSESSMENT DATA SUMMARYBefore this study was undertaken, a complete roadway inventory of the county had notbeen completed since the early 1970’s. At that time a manual assessment wasperformed and from that starting point new roadway miles were added as they wereconstructed. In 2002, Dearborn County claimed 503 miles of county roadways to theIndiana Department of Transportation (INDOT), excluding incorporated areas. At thecompletion of the data extraction for this project it was determined that Dearborn Countywas actually responsible for 532 miles of roadway, a 29 mile increase. This increasehas implications for funding. Funding from the INDOT is determined by the amount ofroadway miles in the county; therefore, Dearborn County should see an increase in theirallocation.3.3 PAVEMENT CHARACTERISTICSPavement TypeAs can be seen from 3A and Figure 3-1, over 80% of the roadway miles in DearbornCounty are paved, with just fewer than 4% or about 20 miles unpaved. Thepaved/unpaved condition, which encompasses approximately 50 miles of roadway in thecounty, is classified as either a segment that contained both pavement and gravel or thepavement had deteriorated to the point where it could no longer be considered rigid.Dearborn County Transportation Assessment Page 3-1