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Revolutionizing Road Condition Monitoring with PAS 2161:2024

Written by Dr. Pete Sanders | Oct 8, 2024

PAS2161:2024 Road condition monitoring (RCM) data.

The national reporting of road condition for the English local road network as historically been carried out using bespoke, dedicated, but expensive, survey vehicles that require expert knowledge to extract insight from. However, substantial progress has been made in the development of modern and innovative technologies for the collection of road condition data. These new technologies provide an opportunity to transform the collection and reporting of road condition data.

The English Department for Transport (DfT), in conjunction with the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), have published a Publicly Available Standard (PAS 2161:2004) (which can be downloaded from (PAS 2161:2024 | 30 Sep 2024 | BSI Knowledge (bsigroup.com)) which revolutionises and modernises the collection and reporting of road condition data for English local authorities.

PAS 2161 is a recognition of the power of advanced road condition data collection and analysis techniques. The ability of NIRA Dynamics data in providing accurate road condition data was assessed through a study carried out by TRL. The study report can be downloaded here (https://trl.co.uk/publications/road-condition-monitoring-data---network-study) and NIRA Dynamics took part as “participant H”, providing some of the best performing data.

The study results were highly promising and provided very positive indications about the robustness of the PAS. For English local roads authorities, PAS 2161 has paved the way to efficiently accessing high quality and cost-effective data for national condition reporting and maintenance planning, enabling them to realise substantial cost savings and improvements to their maintenance planning processes.

For more details, and to understand how PAS 2161 can benefit you, please feel free to get in touch with our experts using the links below.