OBJECTIVE STATE OF ROAD AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS MONITORING IN 2005. FEASIBILITY STUDY

Finnish Road Administration has started a project to develop the monitoring of road and environmental conditions. The aim is to define an objective state for the monitoring in year 2005 that will guide development actions. This feasibility study is the first step in this project. The objectives of the feasibility study are to scope the essential things to the work, to find out the preconditions to the objective state and to plan the actual objective state description project. The current state of the road and environmental data production system was described in six processes. The processes are production of road weather, road maintenance, air pollution, traffic noise, ground water salt concentration and frost damaged roads data. The shortcomings and development needs of each process were analysed. When the objective state is described the role of Road Administration as a public authority has to be remembered. It affects both the data production and the services. Also the international and national recommendations on road weather and standards on weather stations and traffic information exchange have to be considered. It is recommended that the objective state will be described as data services and processes that produce the data. The work was limited to seven new data services that are weather and road weather, frost damaged roads, winter maintenance, customer feedback, winter index and partially air pollution and noise data production. There are also other data services, but those are not included to the project. The work starts with finding out the information needs of users that need road or environmental data. In the feasibility study 15 users were defined. For example traffic control and road maintenance are users. All the data services needed by the users and also the data production processes will be described. The new parts and current parts that need improvement will be defined in more detail.