Quantifying Equitable Roads: Metrics to Understand Pavement Condition Disparities

Pavement conditions are often linked to safety outcomes, greenhouse gas emissions, and a region’s economic development. Although current pavement management systems seek to minimize road agency and user costs, more needs to be explored about how this could be done equitably. However, recent studies have emphasized the absence of standardized measures to assess equity among the diverse communities neighboring road infrastructure. For this reason, this paper uses the existing federal metrics, and proposes new metrics that quantify the monetary impacts on road users from a network, household, and economic perspective. First, the existing federal metrics and their calculation are presented. Then, the methodology to quantify the monetary impact of road users is summarized. The new set of metrics proposed is discussed in detail. The monetary impacts from road users mainly considered additional user costs such as those for fuel, tear and wear, and repair and maintenance by considering passenger and commercial vehicles. Subsequently, New Mexico serves as a case study, with a 50.2% Hispanic population and 18.4% of its residents living in poverty, making it ideal to test the proposed metrics. This paper has been entirely produced using publicly accessible data to state DOTs, facilitating straightforward replication of the methodology. The new metrics proposed fulfill the objective of offering perspectives that are otherwise not visible by just looking at the federal percentage of good or poor pavements. In summary, this paper demonstrates that the proposed metrics help to identify pavement condition disparities that could be impacting populations disproportionally, especially underserved communities. These metrics can be used to assess the need for targeted and localized approaches to address infrastructure and socioeconomic disparities between counties, recognizing that a one-size-fits-all approach may not be suitable for addressing the diverse needs of different communities.