Author: Brad Timofeev

Your agency has a lot of ground to cover. Literally. Municipalities and departments of transportation have acres and acres of land that need to be managed.

PILLAR can help assess the best way to tackle ground that might have to be mowed or best left unmowed and calculate the total mowable area and frequency or necessity of that upkeep.

This practice can help save your agency valuable cash, up to millions.

Mowing Frequency

Knowing what you need to maintain frequently and where to cut back can save millions in costs. Your agency will save in labor and equipment costs and heighten the safety of workers in high-traffic areas.

Certain areas benefit from a less frequent trim. Cutting tall grass and cutting back brush can improve visibility but may only have to be maintained once a year instead of cutting every few months.

The environmental benefits differ as well. If acreage is classified as an environmental benefit, your agency can receive credit toward mitigation and pollution reduction projects, such as pollinator or stormwater run-off programs.

When you contract with PILLAR, you’ll receive a full assessment of best practices.

How PILLAR Calculates & Classifies Mowable Area

PILLAR helps you get a better sense of what is needed for the land you manage.

We use image scanning and Mobile LiDAR, which can accurately inventory acreage that should be added to the total calculated mowable area. Additional access to land plats can help us determine if you can earn environmental stipends for mowing less frequently.

Our services also include an assessment of the terrain, so we can work with you to determine the types of equipment needed and the time and frequency required to maintain that acreage. That information also helps us parse and configure mowing patterns/swaths for full mows or partial mows.

After all the data is collected, we will work with your geospatial system of choice to integrate and normalize your mowing data.

The PILLAR team has more than 100 years of combined experience working with and for municipalities and departments of transportation. We know how to help classify environmental benefits and safety requirements needed to maintain your areas and keep the public safe.

Case Study

PILLAR was able to help Staunton earn $12.8 million in credits for pollution mitigation from our assessment of mowable acreage. Their practices earned them VDOT’s Staunton District’s Environmental Stewardship Award.

Learn how we can help you. Contact us today.

Technology has made creating a geospatial inventory of transportation assets far more accessible than it used to be. However, this asset data may be accumulated from many different sources and may have been collected using disparate techniques and technology, resulting in data that is formatted differently.

The inability of different systems to talk to each other often means that municipalities and departments of transportation frequently resort to recollecting data they already have because of a siloed department structure. This is costly and limiting.

But PILLAR can solve this problem. We can aggregate and normalize data from many different sources (from paper to pdf to complex databases) and departments, giving your organization far greater flexibility and eliminating the need for costly recollection of data you already have.

Getting started

PILLAR will gather all the data files you have already collected, identify what technology generated the data, then audit it and identify a storage solution for optimal visualization for the end-user. We determine goals and help create visualization tools that provide decision-makers with accessible information at their fingertips.

We will get your data into a format that will allow your organization to analyze your data and compare it to other information sources layering artificial intelligence over top of “Big Data.” The resulting enhanced database will allow you to make more informed decisions based on more complete and interconnected information.

In addition, a point cloud analysis powered by PILLAR AFES (automated feature extraction system) will let you provide asset data across your organization, integrating databases and streamlining processes to cut time and share costs.

We’ll help you create a truly useful geospatial inventory of transportation assets that can help determine your priorities, focusing on getting the best return on investment.

Contact PILLAR today so we can get started aggregating your data.

Pavement Preservation is a set of cost-effective treatments that are typically applied on pavements at their early stages and are relatively in good condition. Pavement Preservation allows transportation agencies to treat more lane miles with less cost, while lengthening the pavement’s service life. Transportation agencies adopting Pavement Preservation will extend the benefit of taxpayers’ dollars, among many other benefits.

Primary Benefits of Pavement Preservation

Transportation agencies are paying more attention to Pavement Preservation as their maintenance budgets get tighter each year. This led to the wide adoption of Pavement Preservation treatments within the agency’s operations and maintenance programs. Agencies adopting Pavement Preservation treatments record major benefits that include:

• Improves the condition of pavements and investments
• Remains cost-effective for service life and pavement performance
• Quick application and reduces road user costs and closure times
• Requires fewer resources and energy than reactive maintenance
• Stops the future deterioration of the pavement under your watch

Arguments Against Pavement Preservation Just Don’t Fly

Despite significant benefits, there are some reasons cities and towns don’t invest in pavement preservation as much as reactive maintenance tasks.

Civilians typically prefer all new pavement with new layers of either asphalt concrete or cement concrete. At the early stages of preservation treatment, pavement appears rough and messy until the treatments completely cure. To combat public outcry, engineers must continuously meet with civilians to educate them on the pavement preservation process. Engineers should demonstrate how reactive maintenance is more time-consuming and expensive, costing tax payers more money to fix damaged roads in the long run (see Figure 1).

The primary reason transportation agencies in cities and towns don’t invest in pavement preservation is due to a lack of expertise and knowledge on preservation treatments. With the variety of preservation treatments available, engineers don’t include the preservation treatments in their pavement management programs because they lack the know-how to choose the proper treatments for all road conditions.

Operations and maintenance professionals default to focusing only on damaged pavements, ignoring pavements that are in good condition. Asset management budgets get eaten up by reactive maintenance when they could invest in preserving good roads, therefore investing less in reactive maintenance over time.

Some have the misconception that preservation treatments are an unnecessary expense. In reality, the treatments are quick while costs stay at a minimum. Some agencies in rural areas fear that hiring contractors with pavement preservation expertise will be more costly than local professionals, however, including pavement preservation in pavement management programs will extend budgets and the service life of pavements.

Partnering with PILLAR Pavement Management Engineers

Sometimes an organization doesn’t invest in pavement preservation due to a lack of expertise. There is a certain complexity to managing a network of roadways at different stages in their lifecycle that requires insightful data and a guiding hand.

PILLAR can play a role in assessing needs and making important maintenance decisions.

For example, PILLAR uses ratings to assess the condition of pavements, watching as the condition rating changes with time. This can be helpful to maintain a standard while getting the expertise needed for these numerous treatments.

Choosing the Right Pavement Preservation Treatments

When choosing treatments, PILLAR helps you map out roads, traffic volumes, and regions to make sure that roads are treated in line with the best treatment. There is a wide variety of possible preservation treatments that make the care and maintenance of each road extremely unique.

Every preservation plan is unique based on the special features of the roadway and pavements that make planning your preservation techniques somewhat complicated without a competent partner. PILLAR works with you to identify the condition of the road or pavement and then develop a series of interventions to lengthen the lifecycle of the road, save time, and conserve budgets. Some noteworthy and famous pavement preservation treatments that can be used include:

• Crack Sealant
• Slurry Seal
• Chip Seal
• Cape Seal
• Microsurfacing (Latex)
• THMACO

Find a Partner in Pavement Preservation and Asset Management

PILLAR is a unique firm. It’s the only asset management team devoted at its core with maximizing the lifecycle of your assets. By delivering asset data that informs operations and maintenance decisions at every step in the complex process, PILLAR strengthens your maintenance and preservation plans in ways that could really benefit your infrastructure asset management programs.

Contact PILLAR at info@pillaroma.com or (276) 223-0500 to start with the only asset management firm that merges industry expertise, next-gen technology, and public safety to bring you unparalleled data, service, and expertise.

Assessing and leveraging data on all infrastructure assets within your right-of-way for long term sustainability can be a challenge. As a result, it becomes even more difficult to achieve long term infrastructure goals. Operations & Maintenance advisors can be a highly effective resource in managing your assets and securing the proper funding you need for improving your assets.

PILLAR is the only asset management firm whose core business is dedicated to maximizing the lifecycles of your assets by collecting and delivering asset data that informs operations and maintenance decisions at every step of the process. PILLAR’s focus is holistic and goes beyond the typical pavements and bridges that include assets such as ditches, signs, markings, fence, etc. Optimal asset management includes all assets to give a much wider and inclusive perspective to account for all variables.

Know the Location of Your Assets

Pillar’s collection process combines old school approaches with cutting-edge technology to bring you a cost-effective way to collect massive amounts of inventory data quickly and accurately. Create digital 3-D representations of the right-of-way with PILLAR’s Mobile LiDAR Scanning that includes our Automated Feature Extraction System, extracting features almost as quickly as data is collected. At the same time, you’ll work with boots-on-the-ground maintenance professionals to go places machines and technology can’t reach.

Identify the Condition of Your Assets

PILLAR doesn’t just collect asset data; our professionals assess the data collected to justify the costs required to improve asset conditions. Experts use Condition Indices to measure Condition Rating Criteria for various asset types beyond pavements and bridges, such as pavement markings, guardrails, signs, slopes, fence, and tunnels. Using computer vision allows us to use Street Level Imagery from video stills to detect asset deficiencies. Our geospatial technologies provide in-depth point cloud analysis to give you a global view of the location and condition of your assets. Experienced maintenance staff also perform on-site field assessments and visual inspections.

Take control of Your Operations & Maintenance Plans

Unlike other firms, PILLAR advisors go beyond delivering asset data and go to work on planning strategies for your assets and the future. Data integration is seamless between databases as PILLAR works with numerous suites of geospatial software. You’ll receive solutions within many different contexts, including contract development, daily, weekly, and yearly work plans, bottom-up budgeting and estimating, and response plans in the case of an emergency.

Execute Your Plans with Expertise and Certainty

The PILLAR team not only helps develop your plans, we make sure you execute them. We can augment your staff to meet your program’s needs and oversee staff to ensure your asset management plans reach an optimal result. To fully see your plans through, our advisors can hire Operations and Maintenance managers to manage and control your budget, schedule, quality, as well as your incident, disaster, and weather response. Integration is seamless, coordinated, scheduled, and proactive.

Transform Your Operations & Maintenance Plans with PILLAR

Across the board, PILLAR advisors are a valued part of your team, working to inform you about your assets, offer data-driven decisions to secure proper funding, with in-the-field experience to hire and organize the staff necessary to carry out your plans so you don’t have to.

Stop guessing what to do with your Operations and Maintenance plans and be certain with PILLAR. Email us at info@pillaroma.com or call (276) 223-0500 to get started with the only asset management focused firm merging industry expertise, next-generation technologies, and commitment to public safety.