
The Road Commission of Kalamazoo County (RCKC) partnered with Urban Hawk to conduct a PASER study and asset management report. A PASER report is a document that details the condition of a road surface, using a visual inspection system called “Pavement Surface Evaluation and Rating” (PASER), which assigns a numerical rating on a scale of 1-10 to indicate the overall quality of the pavement.
In 2024, from June to September, Urban Hawk covered almost 26,000 lane miles across Kalamazoo with 10 municipal vehicles outfitted with Urban Hawk technology. Urban Hawk provided RCKC with a comprehensive report card for its roads to help prioritize maintenance and repair needs based on their condition.
Urban Hawk’s platform enabled RCKC to efficiently capture real-time intel and inventory on the following:
- Potholes
- Traffic Signs
- Pavement Markings
- Road Assets
- PASER
For PASER, the Urban Hawk team drove 33.31 lane miles with a leading municipal engineering partner, OHM Advisors, to validate its model’s ground truth. The difference between the human PASER rating and the Urban Hawk rating is compelling and consequential. The platform’s ability to detect transverse, longitudinal, and alligator cracking was the main factor in the rating gap. It is naturally very difficult for the human eye to capture everything on city roads, and these types of cracks are usually hidden by shadows or dark asphalt. In conclusion, Urban Hawk’s rating averaged a 7.06, while the human rating averaged a 7.47, aligning with the PASER rating for the year of 2024.
In total, Urban Hawk was able to detect a total of 93,511 road elements. The adoption of Urban Hawk’s advanced pavement marking detection was able to pin point exactly where degradations were occurring for pavement markings, eliminating the road commission’s need to go out and do blanket approaches to fixes.
Joanna I. Johnson, retired Managing Director of the Road Commission of Kalamazoo County:
“Urban Hawk has proven to be an essential and collaborative partner for the RCKC in this case study. Their platform not only adapts and evolves but also employs a proactive and intelligent strategy for managing critical public assets.”
Check out our case study with the Road Commission of Kalamazoo County!
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