Implementation Guide for the Management
of Unsealed Gravel Roads
George Huntington and Khaled Ksaibati
To address the current lack of a gravel roads management system
(GRMS) appropriate for the rural agencies of the Intermountain West and
the Great Plains, the Wyoming Technology Transfer Center (T2/LTAP)
consulted with a volunteer group of experts and practitioners in the
fields of unsealed earth and gravel roads and roadway management to put
together a set of recommendations and guidelines for managing unsealed
roads. This paper describes and summarizes the gravel roads manage-
ment methodology developed by T2/LTAP under the guidance of this
group. Steps in implementing a GRMS are described, beginning with an
assessment stage in which an agency evaluates its current unsealed roads
information management and the resources available to improve it. Next,
three elements of a GRMS are described: data management, inven-
tory, and data collection. Eight maintenance tasks for unsealed roads are
described: blading, reshaping, regraveling, dust control, stabilization, iso-
lated repairs, major work, and drainage maintenance. Primary outputs
of a GRMS are described, including cyclic maintenance scheduling, trig-
gered maintenance scheduling, and network-level outputs, including
network-level monitoring, financial tables, and road tables and maps.
Safety and drainage assessments are described briefly. Recommendations
are made for putting these procedures into practice.
To address the current lack of a gravel roads management system
(GRMS) appropriate for small, rural government agencies, the
Wyoming Department of Transportation and the Mountain-Plains
Consortium funded Wyoming’s local technical assistance program
(LTAP), the Wyoming Technology Transfer Center (T2/LTAP), to
develop a GRMS methodology. T2/LTAP consulted with a volun-
teer group of experts and practitioners in the fields of unsealed roads
and roadway management to put together a set of recommendations
and guidelines for managing unsealed roads. This paper describes and
summarizes the gravel roads management methodology developed
by T2/LTAP under the guidance of this group of experts.
LITERATURE REVIEW AND
STATE OF THE PRACTICE
Many efforts have been made to better manage unsealed roads. One
aspect that becomes increasingly apparent as one reviews these
efforts is that every system is tailored to a specific situation. No two
Wyoming Technology Transfer Center, 1000 East University Avenue, Department
3295, Laramie, WY 82071. Corresponding author: G. Huntington, georgeh@
uwyo.edu.
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board,
No. 2205, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington,
D.C., 2011, pp. 189–197.
DOI: 10.3141/2205-24
189
organizations have the same problems or the same resources, so
each must develop a different solution. The following discussions
investigate some of the work that provided guidance for the devel-
opment of a gravel roads management methodology suitable for small
local governments.
The World Bank developed a number of software programs
including the Roads Economic Decisions Model, the Deterioration
of Unpaved Roads (DETOUR) Model, and Highway Development
and Management (HDM-4) (1). The DETOUR model uses a fairly
lengthy list of inputs to predict the deterioration of unpaved roads,
including environmental, geometric, traffic, surfacing material, main-
tenance policy, and material loss calibration variables. Although
collecting many of these inputs is beyond most counties’ means, it
may be of value if one makes sweeping assumptions about the values
for some of the inputs.
A procedure for scheduling routine maintenance was developed
in South Africa’s Western Cape Province. A pilot study was con-
ducted and algorithms were developed to schedule routine unsealed
roads maintenance (2). Two algorithms are compared, one that min-
imizes the network roughness, and one that minimizes the total
transportation cost (TTC), which considers both agency and road
user costs. These two algorithms prioritize the sequence in which
road sections need to be bladed. It is concluded that the TTC algo-
rithm is the most efficient, but that either algorithm represents an
improvement over the usual way of doing business, which consisted
of simply maintaining the entire network, then going back to the
start of the route and maintaining the entire network again, without
regard for surface conditions or user costs.
For more than 10 years, Western Cape Province has been using
visual assessments of road conditions to program periodic mainte-
nance (3). An extensive and comprehensive training manual was
assembled that describes the various features rated during the visual
assessment (4). This manual provides excellent guidance on defining
the degree and extent of distresses, relating subjective terminology
to estimated percentages of the road affected by a given distress.
Several LTAP centers in the United States, notably the Michigan,
New Hampshire, and Utah LTAP Centers, have developed roadway
management systems although none have sophisticated methods for
managing unsealed roads. That led the Wyoming T2/LTAP to develop
its own analytical procedures as part of a pilot asset management
program conducted from 2004 to 2006 (5–8).
The Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada developed
an unsealed roads routine maintenance blading scheduling pro-
gram based on continuously collected data from its Opti-Grade®
instrument (9).
The Wisconsin Transportation Information Center put together
a gravel road rating manual that describes how to perform surveys
on the basis of visual observations, referred to as the Pavement
Surface Evaluation and Rating (PASER) Manual, which yields an
190 Transportation Research Record 2205

overall condition rating based on surface conditions and drainage
characteristics (10).
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and
Engineering Laboratory developed procedures for evaluating unsealed
roads. By measuring the severity and extent of various distresses,
deduct values are determined from graphs and an unsurfaced road
condition index is calculated (11).
Four manuals provide excellent guidance for those responsible
for taking care of unsealed roads. They are the Gravel Roads Main-
tenance and Design Manual from the South Dakota LTAP (12), the
Low Volume Roads Engineering: Best Management Practices Field
Guide from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Forest Ser-
vice (13), Pennsylvania’s Environmentally Sensitive Maintenance for
Dirt and Gravel Roads (14), and the Australian Unsealed Roads
Manual: Guidelines to Good Practice (15). The South Dakota manual
is for maintainers, the Forest Service and Pennsylvania manuals are
for those responsible for design and construction, and the Australian
manual is for managers.
METHODOLOGY
Fifty-four experts from academia; federal, state, and local govern-
ments; and the private sector (see Table 1) formally participated in
this project through e-mails, a webinar, and the meetings listed below.
Many others had less formal inputs.
• Unsealed roads management–specific meetings:
– July 27, 2009: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (in conjunction with
the National LTAP Association Annual Conference);
– October 6, 2009: Webinar;
– October 20, 2009: Rapid City, South Dakota (in conjunction
with the Local Road Advisors Conference); and
– January 12, 2010: Washington, D.C. (in conjunction with the
TRB annual meeting).
• General meetings with unsealed roads management presented:
– September 24, 2009: Laramie, Wyoming (at the Wyoming
Association of County Engineers and Road Supervisors meeting);
– October 8, 2009: Rapid City, South Dakota (at the D-Ware
Conference); and
– January 11, 2010: Washington, D.C. (at the meeting of the
TRB Low-Volume Roads Committee).
On the basis of the results of these and other communications, the
T2/LTAP prepared a number of drafts that outlined progress so far
and provided direction for further discussion (16). Finally, three main
products were produced: a final report, an implementation guide,
and a programming guide (16). The final report documents this effort.
The implementation guide assists road managers trying to improve
their agency’s information management procedures; the program-
ming guide provides guidance to data managers in setting up a data
storage system.
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
Development of the implementation guide was driven by the fact
that the cost of maintaining unsealed roads is going up while the cost
of managing information is going down (16). Given this fact, it makes
sense to increase the use of information to reduce maintenance costs.
The guide tries to help road managers make this transition. It is writ-
ten primarily for those who realize that their agencies could operate
more efficiently and that they could present a clearer picture of their
operations to elected officials and the public if they did a better job
of collecting, managing, analyzing, and presenting information.
The guide breaks down the GRMS implementation process into
several elements. First, a road manager assesses the agency’s cur-
rent situation and resources. From this assessment, the road manager
determines what steps to take to improve the road network’s data
management, inventory, historical data collection, and performance
monitoring, leading to more efficient maintenance scheduling and
providing a variety of network level outputs that will be useful to the
road manager and to elected officials. The following discussions
briefly describe the processes outlined in the guide.
Assessment
Road managers should answer several basic questions when con-
templating improving their agency’s unsealed roads management:
• How are we collecting, analyzing, and using information about
our unsealed roads?
• What resources do we have to improve our information
management?

TABLE 1 Experts’ Participation

Experts E-mail Pittsburgh, Pa., Rapid City, Washington, D.C.,

Organization or Affiliation Solicited Comments Meeting Webinar S. Dak., Meeting Meeting Total Inputs

Counties 23 6 0 1 5 1 13
Municipalities 4 1 0 0 0 0 1
State department of 5 2 0 2 0 1 5
transportation
FHWA 4 3 0 0 0 0 3
USDA Forest Service 5 4 0 0 0 3 7
Other federal 5 1 0 0 0 0 1
LTAP/TTAPa 19 4 10 6 4 7 31
Academia 8 5 1 1 0 2 9
Other public 3 3 3 1 0 1 8
Private software providers 5 0 0 2 2 0 4
Total 81 29 14 13 11 15 82

a
TTAP = Tribal Technical Assistance Program.
Huntington and Ksaibati
• What should we do next to improve our unsealed roads
management?
The goal of the guide is to help managers answer the last question.
To do that, the first two questions must be answered. The following
discussions provide managers with advice on how to answer them.
When assessing an agency’s current information management
practices, the following questions should be asked:
• How are costs tracked?
• Are cost data useful for managers? Do the data help them
manage their roads better?
• How are routine maintenance, regraveling, and drainage
maintenance scheduled?
• How do maintenance costs vary with different gravel types and
maintenance practices?
• Can we improve our maintenance and rehabilitation practices
by improving our information collection, management, and analysis?
For most small agencies managing an unsealed road network, the
answers to those questions will indicate that upgrades to their
information management are warranted.
Once the need for improvement has been established, the next step
is to perform an assessment, considering the following resources:
• Support;
• Financial resources;
• Hardware, software, Global Positioning System (GPS), and
geographic information system (GIS);
• Information; and
• Personnel.
Once these resources have been appraised, the agency should decide
what to do next to help its unsealed roads management processes
evolve into a more useful, sustainable system. The following sections
provide insight into making that decision.
Data Management
A critical element of any GRMS is its data management process. An
early data management decision will be whether to purchase a com-
mercial software package, obtain a free package, or develop soft-
ware internally. A review of the assessment results should provide
some indication as to whether an agency should acquire software or
develop it internally from a spreadsheet, database, or GIS package.
Most data management systems can be assigned to one of the
following three general types:
• Manual,
• Databases or spreadsheets, and
• GIS.
Generally, the larger the road network, the more advantageous it
will be to work toward the bottom of this list. In addition to network
size, an agency’s available expertise, particularly computer exper-
tise, should play into the decision-making process when an informa-
tion management system is selected. It may be worthwhile to work
with a commercial software provider, particularly if an agency is
preparing to institute a better system for tracking maintenance tasks
and costs. Any agency considering implementing a GRMS should
191
make its information management decisions on the basis of both its
needs and its resources.
Inventory
An inventory is simply a list of road sections and a few of their fun-
damental, static attributes. Once a good inventory is established,
data about the road network can be collected and stored efficiently.
Without the structure an inventory provides, other, more sophisticated
elements of a GRMS are not possible. At the very least, the following
aspects of a road network should be collected and stored:
• Unique section identification,
• Location,
• Surface type, and
• Length.
Without this very basic information, no formal management can
take place.
Once an initial inventory is in place, it will usually be advanta-
geous to subdivide the roads into fairly homogeneous maintenance
management sections varying in length from as little as a few hun-
dred yards to a dozen miles or more. The more sections there are,
the more data that will need to be collected. However, if sections are
too long, portions of a road that should be managed separately may
be analyzed together, limiting the value of outputs from the GRMS.
There are a number of factors to consider when dividing a road
network into appropriate sections. A fundamental consideration will
be whether a section has been maintained as a single unit in the past.
Maintainers will usually be responsible for establishing the begin-
ning and ending points of maintenance management sections on the
basis of the following factors:
• Typical surface condition,
• Maintenance history,
• Construction history,
• Traffic,
• Road use,
• Land use,
• Subgrade type, and
• Terrain.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also provides guidance on the
division of a road network into sections (11).
Data Collection
Once an inventory is established, three types of data are collected,
answering these questions:
• What is done to the road?
• How do traffic, weather, and subgrade affect a road’s perfor-
mance?
• How does the road perform?
If these three questions are answered completely, the road can be
analyzed and managed very efficiently. However, answering these
questions costs money, and it is not cost-effective to answer them
all completely.
192
There are also logistical questions that need to be answered before
beginning data collection:
• Who collects the data?
• How are the data collected?
• When are condition data collected?
The following sections provide guidance on answering those
questions.
Historical Data: What Is Done to the Road?
An agency’s unsealed roads maintenance and rehabilitation tasks
should be tracked, as many agencies already do, although they may
not be tracked so that the resulting information is easily accessible
by road managers. Many agencies track costs with a system devel-
oped by accountants to track money. From a road management point
of view, it is also important to track maintenance costs and tasks in
regard to how the road itself is treated. For example, it matters to
accountants whether gravel is hauled in a contractor’s truck or in the
agency’s truck, but from a road management point of view, that is
irrelevant. However, it is important to the road manager to know
whether the gravel is used to repair a soft spot or to regravel the
entire section; many systems set up by accountants do not make that
distinction. Data should be collected in a way that is useful to road
managers as well as to accountants.
The following maintenance and rehabilitation tasks are defined in
more detail in the implementation guide (16). They are very similar
to those put forth by the National Association of County Engineers
(NACE), with minor adjustments and clarifications, and they are
listed below (17 ):
• Blading (surface smoothing, dragging),
• Reshaping (pulling shoulders, cleaning ditches, reestablishing
crown),
• Regraveling,
• Dust control,
• Stabilization,
• Isolated repairs (spot gravel, patching, soft spot repair),
• Major work (major repairs, realignment, rehabilitation, recon-
struction), and
• Drainage maintenance.
From an unsealed roads management point of view, all costs should
be attributable to one of the eight tasks described above and to an
individual road section.
Other Data: How Do Traffic, Weather,
and Subgrade Affect a Road’s Performance?
Precipitation and traffic are the two primary environmental impacts
on unsealed roads. A related impact comes from below as the sub-
grade supports or fails to support the roadway. Traffic monitoring
should take place on as many sections as possible although higher
volume roads should have top priority, with estimates of traffic as
an alternative if counts are not available.
Precipitation dramatically affects the performance of unsealed
earth and gravel roads (6). Unfortunately, agencies will rarely have
local precipitation data, and even if they do, the precipitation at
one end of a section may be different from that at the other end. A
Transportation Research Record 2205
single value to evaluate the effect of weather may be useful, such as
Weinert’s N-value developed in South Africa, which uses rainfall,
air temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed to predict decom-
position of surfacing aggregate (18). A GRMS should be able to
function without weather data.
Subgrade type critically affects unsealed roads’ performance.
Although it would be helpful to have detailed laboratory tests on
every subgrade, a simple rating on a scale from very good to very
poor or the use of the AASHTO soil classification system or the uni-
fied soil classification system might provide useful information.
When one road is performing better or worse than another, the sub-
grade type may be causing the discrepancy. It would be helpful to
recognize that by having an evaluation of the subgrade.
Condition Data: How Does the Road Perform?
Assessing the condition of an unsealed road is difficult. A GRMS
has the conflicting goals of providing the best possible service at the
lowest possible cost. The quality of the driving surface is a primary
measure of “the best possible service,” so some measure of surface
condition is needed.
Once an inventory is established and a road network’s history is
being recorded, the next step in unsealed roads management is per-
formance monitoring. By evaluating road surface conditions in a
systematic way, maintenance and repair schedules may be gener-
ated. Such schedules will lead to a wide variety of outputs, includ-
ing cyclic and triggered maintenance programs and assessments of
how an unsealed road network’s overall condition is changing with
time. However, there is a trade-off: it takes time and money to collect
and manage data. In addition, there are several logistical problems
with monitoring the surface condition of unsealed roads:
• Rapid deterioration,
• Maintenance, and
• Weather and precipitation.
Those issues need to be considered before an unsealed roads
condition monitoring effort is undertaken.
There are several methods for evaluating the quality of an unsealed
road’s surface as perceived by the traveling public and by those who
work on the roads. Simply put, the public is concerned with current
conditions, whereas agency employees are concerned with the main-
tenance the roads will need and how current conditions predict future
conditions.
There are four basic options when unsealed roads’ surface condi-
tion is being monitored and performance is contemplated, each with
its strengths and weaknesses:
• Visual windshield surveys,
• Manual measurement of distress severities and extents,
• Automated condition surveys, and
• Gravel thickness measurement.
Equipment purchases, training time, and data collection time,
along with their costs, should all be considered when data collec-
tion methods are selected. The following discussions address some
of those issues.
Visual Windshield Surveys The simplest method of evaluating
a road’s surface is to drive the road and subjectively rate it. The
Huntington and Ksaibati
pavement surface evaluation and rating (PASER) system is a good
example of this approach (10); it includes drainage considerations
such as crown and ditches in its overall condition evaluation. The
Wyoming T2/LTAP has developed a ride quality rating guide that
evaluates only the road’s surface condition (16). Training and qual-
ity control procedures are critical to maintaining consistency when
using a subjective visual survey. A simple, subjective rating of a
road’s surface condition, particularly when the evaluator is focusing
on it alone, can provide good, repeatable results at a low cost.
As part of a 3-year asset management program conducted for
Wyoming’s Carbon, Johnson, and Sheridan Counties during 2004,
2005, and 2006, T2/LTAP hired and trained more than a dozen stu-
dents and retirees to perform data collection. Efforts were made to
ensure that the data were collected as consistently as possible. Two-
day training was performed each year in the classroom and in the
field by a staff engineer. Follow-up evaluations and retraining were
performed in the field after several weeks to correct and calibrate the
various road raters. Based on these experiences, the recommenda-
tion is made that road surface conditions be rated on a scale of 1 to 10,
as follows, with reasonable travel speeds as shown below, assuming
they are not limited by alignment, geometry, or sight distance:
1. Failed: 0–8 mph (0–13 km/h);
2. Very poor: 8–15 mph (13–24 km/h);
3. Poor, closer to very poor: 15–20 mph (24–32 km/h);
4. Poor, closer to fair: 20–25 mph (32–40 km/h);
5. Fair, closer to poor: 25–32 mph (40–51 km/h);
6. Fair, closer to good: 32–40 mph (51–64 km/hr);
7. Good, closer to fair: 40–45 mph (64–72 km/h);
8. Good, closer to very good: 45–50 mph (72–80 km/h);
9. Very good: 50–60 mph (80–97 km/h); and
10. Excellent: 60+ mph (97+ km/h).
The dividing line of 25 mph between poor and fair is as recommended
by the Gravel PASER manual (10).
It has been argued that a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 7 should be used.
A scale of 1 to 10 is recommended for these reasons: With the scale
of 1 to 10 described above, very few roads fall into the excellent or
very good categories; similarly, roads that fall into the very poor or
failed categories are generally maintained so infrequently and carry
so little traffic that they are not important when managing roads,
although these lower ratings should still be available for those
instances in which a normally adequate road suffers from adverse
traffic or weather events. Thus, most roads of interest when manage-
ment decisions are being made are in the good, fair, or poor cate-
gories, leaving those who rate the roads with only three options.
With a little training and experience, most road evaluators can dis-
cern more than three possible conditions. To confine them to three
choices reduces their ability to accurately and precisely portray a
road section’s condition. By using only three ratings in the good-
fair-poor range, the abilities of an adequately trained road rater are
not fully utilized. The scale of 1 to 10 proposed above allows raters
to provide managers with as much accurate information as is possible
with a visual survey.
Another significant issue relates to inclusion or exclusion of those
factors that do not affect the current quality of the road, but that do
affect a road’s durability—crown, drainage, gravel quality, and thick-
ness. Whether or not to consider these durability factors depends on
how the data are to be used. If one is programming maintenance such
as regraveling or drainage, or if one is trying to predict the road’s
performance, these durability factors should be rated. If one is try-
ing to program routine blading or assess the public’s opinion of the
193
road’s condition, only surface distresses—washboards, dust, rutting,
loose aggregate, erosion, and potholes—should be evaluated.
Manual Measurement of Distresses The U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers developed a method of deriving an unsurfaced road con-
dition index (URCI) by using distress extent and severity measure-
ments to determine deduct values, resulting in a URCI between 0
and 100 (11). This method is too time-consuming to be used on most
road networks on the order of hundreds of miles, although it may be
useful as a check of other data collection methods or as part of a
sampling condition assessment procedure.
Automated Data Collection At least two automated roughness
measurement devices for unsealed roads are available and in use by
a number of jurisdictions worldwide. They have been used effec-
tively to continuously adjust maintenance schedules. One is used in
Canada to program routine maintenance (9); another is used in Aus-
tralia (15). As GPS and other related systems become more sophis-
ticated, automated data collection is becoming more viable, perhaps
even for small, local agencies. They could be used to continuously
monitor road conditions on a vehicle that routinely travels a road
network, making them excellent candidates for programming routine
maintenance.
Gravel Thickness The purpose of collecting gravel thickness data
is twofold. First, regraveling can be programmed on the basis of
existing thicknesses, rather than on the time since the road was last
regraveled, and second, this information can be used to generate a
remaining service life (RSL) for each road and for the network as a
whole, a useful value when one is educating decision makers about
the unsealed road network’s long-term condition. Thickness is a
critical indicator of the time until the next regraveling and the road’s
future performance. It provides a method of estimating the remain-
ing life of an unsealed road’s surface, with “remaining life” defined
as the time until the most expensive unsealed road maintenance
procedure, regraveling, needs to be performed.
Data Collectors: Who Collects the Data?
There are several options in regard to deciding who will collect
unsealed roads data. Operators, supervisors, and other agency
employees may evaluate the roads, either during the course of their
other activities or as a separate task. Dedicated data collectors may
also evaluate roads. Recent agency retirees are obvious people to
hire because they have a good knowledge of the road network and
of unsealed roads in general.
Condition data, particularly the ride-related distresses of potholes,
ruts, and washboards, can be rated by anyone with experience driving
unsealed roads and sufficient diligence to provide consistent data.
Other data, such as drainage and safety ratings, should be collected
by skilled individuals. These attributes of a road are not necessarily
obvious to the general public.
Thickness data should be collected by individuals who have the
necessary equipment at their disposal, a skid steer with an auger or
other suitable equipment, to quickly dig holes in the road to estimate
gravel thickness. They must also have sufficient experience with
unsealed roads to discern lift lines from a core hole.
The least expensive data will be data that are collected as a part
of someone’s usual routine. Operators might take an extra minute
and evaluate the surface condition of the road section they are about
to maintain.
194 Transportation Research Record 2205

Intermediate in cost will be the data collected by agency employ-
ees, generally during slow periods. They are already on the payroll,
so keeping them productive during slow times by sending them out
to collect data may save money in the long run by allowing the
supervisor to make better decisions when things become busy.
The most expensive data will be data that are collected by people
hired specifically for the purpose of collecting data. These data will
also be the most consistent, because there will be fewer individuals
collecting the data, and they should be well trained and focused on
the task of gathering information.
Timing of Condition Data Collection:
When Are Condition Data Collected?
Timing condition data collection is a particularly vexing issue, because
surface conditions may change so often and so quickly.
Ongoing data collection may take place largely as part of an
agency’s other activities. Generally, the timing of this data collec-
tion will be driven by the availability of labor. Still, some consid-
eration should be given to recent precipitation and maintenance
activities. An attempt should be made to rate roads when they have
neither been maintained nor rained on too recently so their current
condition is typical of that throughout much of the year.
An exception to this generalization occurs if data are used to
determine when to perform routine maintenance. For that purpose,
one wants to know the current condition, particularly the quality of
the riding surface, so one should simply rate the current condi-
tions. These types of data will most likely be collected automatically
because one generally cannot collect data fast enough to establish
routine maintenance schedules with a nonautomated system.
classes, maintenance intervention levels, maintenance strategies, or
other means, it may begin to develop prioritized lists of sections to
receive maintenance ranging from routine blading to stabilization
or regraveling. Figure 1 illustrates how such a system might work,
including initial inputs, the maintenance cycle, and condition-based
feedback and analysis.
Inputs
An initial inventory is the starting point for a GRMS. Once it is estab-
lished, the road network should be broken down into maintenance
sections as already described.
A minimum acceptable surface condition, the maintenance inter-
vention level, should be assigned to each section on the basis of
several considerations, including:
• Traffic volume,
• Functional class,
• Road usage,
• User costs, and
• Political considerations.
Each agency should describe and document the standard mainte-
nance strategies it currently uses, along with any other mainte-
nance strategies it would like to program into its GRMS. Each road
section should have a maintenance strategy and task frequencies
assigned to it (8). The goal of a maintenance strategy assignment
should be to maintain the section at or above the maintenance
intervention level.

Cyclic Maintenance Scheduling
Once an agency has an inventory of its unsealed roads, including
some sort of prioritization using techniques involving functional
Maintenance Cycle
To develop a prioritized list of maintenance tasks, a GRMS should
first determine what the next tasks are for every section and when they
are due, as shown in the upper two rectangles of the cycle trapezoid

Inputs
Divide the road network Develop a MAINTENANCE
into SECTIONS STRATEGIES table

Assign a MAINTENANCE STRATEGY to each SECTION

Determine next maintenance PRIORITIZE tasks on all

TASK for each SECTION and sections based on WHEN each
WHEN this task should be task is due; Develop prioritized
performed list of TASKS

Cycle
RECORD
Perform maintenance
task and
TASKS
section

ANALYZE performance RECORD Surface

of each SECTION CONDITIONS

Optional Feedback and Analysis

FIGURE 1 Cyclic maintenance scheduling.

Huntington and Ksaibati 195

in Figure 1. To do this, one needs to know when each task was last
performed and the scheduled intervals between task performance.
A potential problem arises when maintenance is delayed, perhaps
as a result of weather or insufficient resources. As the following
example illustrates, by estimating the percentage of the recommended
time until each maintenance activity should be performed, this
problem can be overcome:
If a road of very low volume in January 2011 (time 2011.0) is
scheduled to receive drainage maintenance, routine blading, regrav-
eling, and reshaping, and if these tasks were last performed at the
times shown in the upper part of the column in Table 2 for time of
last performance, then they would be at the percentages of the time
of the scheduled maintenance shown in the upper part of the column
in Table 2 for current percentage of scheduled time. At this time,
reshaping, at 123%, should be performed next. However, if no
maintenance is performed until Time 2011.7 (September 2011),
then blading, at 180% of the time until maintenance is due, becomes
the recommended maintenance, as shown in the lower part of Table 2.
This illustrates the ability of this approach to change priorities as
time passes. The more pressing need to maintain adequate surface
condition takes precedence over the longer term needs such as
drainage maintenance, reshaping, and regraveling, which although
important, are not needed as urgently as removing surface distresses.
This system is also flexible. If, in the example above, more time
passed and drainage maintenance was overdue, the supervisor could
decide that drainage maintenance should never be allowed to exceed
150% of the recommended time even if other activities are also
overdue. Also, if it was determined that a particular road needed
to be maintained to a higher standard, its maintenance frequencies
could be increased, thereby providing a superior level of service to
an individual road section.
Once the maintainers and supervisors have their prioritized lists
in hand, they maintain the roads. As maintenance is performed, the
work done on each section is recorded and stored in a database. This
new information is used to generate new priority lists, and the cycle
continues. This system should be viewed as a tool to assist the super-
visor when planning maintenance, not as a schedule to be followed
blindly.
targeted minimums can be compared with the observed surface con-
ditions when maintenance is performed. A road that is consistently
in better condition than its desired minimum could have its time
between maintenance tasks extended, and one often in worse condi-
tion than the desired minimum could have its time between mainte-
nance tasks shortened. This approach provides a very simple means
of lowering maintenance costs while keeping all roads in adequate
condition with very minimal field data collection.
Triggered Maintenance Scheduling
The principles of any triggered maintenance program are simple:
For each road section, a minimum performance threshold is estab-
lished, and when conditions fall below that threshold, maintenance
is performed. It is unclear whether any proactive maintenance of
unsealed roads might be beneficial, analogous to preventive main-
tenance of asphalt pavements. If proactive approaches are thought
to be advantageous, systems could be developed to, for example,
regravel whenever surfacing gravel thickness drops below 2 in.
The future of triggered maintenance programs is not well defined,
although as more sophisticated and inexpensive data collection, par-
ticularly automated systems, becomes more prevalent, triggered
maintenance may become more commonplace.
One type of triggered maintenance scheduling involves the use of
a continuous monitoring device to program routine blading; another
uses gravel thickness data to program regraveling. The Canadian
automated evaluation and rating system is documented elsewhere
(9); however, the use of gravel thickness as a maintenance trigger is
not known to be well documented.
Network-Level Outputs
Network-level outputs may be split into two types:
• Information that helps provide better, less expensive service and
• Outputs used to communicate with elected officials and the
public.

Optional Feedback and Analysis Network-Level Condition Monitoring

If operators evaluate a road section immediately before they main- A primary objective of a road management system is to provide an
tain it, the frequency at which maintenance is performed may be overall network condition assessment. One of the most basic pieces
adjusted on the basis of these evaluations. Because each section of information of interest to elected officials is whether the overall
should have a targeted minimum acceptable surface condition, the network condition is improving, staying the same, or becoming

TABLE 2 Maintenance Strategy Example

Scheduled Time
Current Time Time of Last Time Since Last Between Task Current Percentage
(year) Task Performance (year) Performance (years) Performance (years) of Scheduled Time

2011.0 Drainage 2004.8 6.2 7.0 89

Blading 2010.8 0.2 0.5 40
Reshaping 2002.4 8.6 7.0 123
Regravel 2002.4 8.6 14.0 61
2011.7 Drainage 2004.8 6.9 7.0 99
Blading 2010.8 0.9 0.5 180
Reshaping 2002.4 9.3 7.0 133
Regravel 2002.4 9.3 14.0 66
196
worse. With sealed or paved roads, there are quantitative ways of
assessing average network condition by using instruments that mea-
sure the international roughness index. Although there are similar
instruments available for unsealed roads, there are systematic prob-
lems, mainly the weather and maintenance practices, that may eas-
ily cause substantial networkwide bias in condition data, particularly
if the data are collected during a single event.
The best assessment of an unsealed road network’s long-term
condition and RSL is probably gravel thickness. Although fre-
quent condition monitoring might yield overall network condition
assessments, until very inexpensive means of collecting and pro-
cessing a great deal of data become available, a proxy such as gravel
thickness is needed to assess an unsealed road network’s overall
condition.
Financial Tables
Financial tables describe where and how money is being spent.
Three fundamental variables are
• Maintenance and rehabilitation tasks,
• Road and road section, and
• Time frame.
It is hoped that costs could be determined, for example, for blading
and regraveling for all roads of a given type during a 10-year period.
Other costs would probably also be included, such as sign, culvert,
asphalt road, and bridge costs. Such tables would provide a good
overall picture of where and how an agency is spending its money.
What these tables do not tell is whether these expenditures are yield-
ing good results. An agency wants to know not only what it is spend-
ing its money on, but also if it is spending it efficiently; financial tables
will not indicate that.
Road Tables (and Maps)
Depending on the available data, a wide variety of tables (and maps
if a GIS is used) can be generated, such as the following:
• Maintenance histories for individual sections,
• Road works maps or tables indicating where a given mainte-
nance task has been performed,
• Section condition maps or tables indicating road surface con-
ditions, and
• Condition projection maps, which may become available as
condition prediction models are implemented.
Safety Assessment
The safety component of this effort is tailored primarily to roads
with too little traffic for crash data to be statistically useful, and it
should address safety issues that can be improved at low cost, such
as minor geometric improvements made while pulling shoulders and
reshaping ditches. The safety component of this effort should com-
pliment other safety efforts, such as those based on crash data,
road safety assessments, and other formalized safety improvement
procedures.
Transportation Research Record 2205
Drainage Assessment
Drainage should be rated to identify sections with significant prob-
lems, particularly those related to maintenance, and to provide
insight as to why a given road may be performing poorly. It should
assist maintainers with identifying areas where additional drainage
maintenance or upgrades are needed.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
This paper addresses the need for an unsealed gravel roads manage-
ment methodology suitable for small government agencies. Infor-
mation and opinions were assembled from a variety of experts, and
a recommended methodology was generated on the basis of those
opinions. By hosting face-to-face meetings and a webinar and solic-
iting input by telephone and e-mail, T2/LTAP developed an unsealed
roads management methodology. Procedures for implementing a
gravel roads management system (GRMS) are described.
This paper summarizes Gravel Roads Management: Implementa-
tion Guide and describes these four implementation steps (16):
• Assessment,
• Data management,
• Inventory, and
• Data collection.
It also addresses these outputs of a GRMS:
• Cyclic maintenance scheduling,
• Triggered maintenance scheduling,
• Network-level outputs—network-level condition monitoring,
• Financial tables, and
• Road tables and maps.
Several basic conclusions were drawn from this effort:
• There are three fundamental elements of unsealed roads
management; they follow in the order in which they should be
undertaken:
– Inventory,
– Maintenance and cost tracking, and
– Performance monitoring.
• Because of the limited resources of small agencies, simplicity
is critical to making a gravel roads management system (GRMS)
work for them. This fact, combined with the reality that it does not
make economic sense to spend a great deal of time or money on man-
aging very-low-volume roads, dictates that a GRMS must not consume
a large amount of resources, but must still produce useful results, both
for elected officials and for road managers.
• Functional classes should follow those described in two
AASHTO publications, the Very-Low-Volume Roads Design Guide
(19) and the Green Book (20).
• A transition in tracking maintenance tasks is needed because,
historically, many unsealed road networks’ costs have been tracked
by using line items and procedures useful to accountants, but of
lesser value to roadway managers. Methods for tracking maintenance
costs and histories need improvement and should be done by using
maintenance tasks such as these:
– Blading,
– Reshaping,
Huntington and Ksaibati
– Regraveling,
– Dust control,
– Stabilization,
– Isolated repairs,
– Major work, and
– Drainage.
• Cyclic maintenance procedures can be implemented with rela-
tively little effort.
• Automated data collection systems, such as the Opti-Grade (9)
and ground-penetrating radar measurement of gravel thickness,
show considerable promise as these technologies develop.
• Visual survey methods are currently the most easily adapted to
small agency operations.
• Tracking gravel is a critical management function:
– Tons/mile/year;
– Properties: plastic limit, liquid limit, gradation, and others; and
– Thickness.
Human issues will be the greatest obstacles when the management
of unsealed roads is being improved. Persuading those who must
implement such procedures of the new system’s merits is crucial to
its success. If inputs are inaccurate or the results of such a system
are not trusted, the system is not likely to succeed in its goals of per-
suading politicians to make good decisions and of improving the
efficiency of unsealed roads maintenance activities.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank all experts who volunteered their time to make this
effort a success, with particular thanks to Ken Skorseth of the South
Dakota Local Technical Assistance Program and Gary Berreth of the
North Dakota Local Technical Assistance Program, without whose
encouragement and support this project would not have been carried
out. The authors also thank the Mountain–Plains Consortium and the
Wyoming Department of Transportation, particularly Martin Kidner,
for supporting this effort.
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The opinions expressed and products mentioned in this report do not constitute
any endorsement or policy of the Mountain–Plains Consortium, the Wyoming
Department of Transportation, or the University of Wyoming.
The Committee for the 10th International Conference on Low-Volume Roads
peer-reviewed this paper.