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City pilots equity‑aware pavement management plan; consultants use LIDAR to score roads
Summary
Public Works updated council on the pavement management strategic plan, reporting a current PCI of 86, plans to adopt Pavement Express/GIS integration, funding levels for reconstruction and overlay programs, and a new street‑selection method that folds equity and criticality into prioritization.
Sammamish Public Works presented a pavement management strategic plan update Tuesday that will guide prioritization of maintenance, rehabilitation and reconstruction over the next five years. The plan introduces a new street‑selection approach that combines pavement condition with a criticality matrix that includes road class, high‑use areas and multiple equity factors.
Public Works Director Audrey Sarci and consultant‑team lead Jenna (Jen) Renelli described technical steps of the project: road‑surface data collection by LIDAR, condition modeling and onboarding of a new GIS/asset system (Pavement Express) to integrate condition data with the city’s operational systems. “It drives down along the road, firing thousands of laser pulses every second,” Renelli said, describing the lidar data‑collection vehicle and how it produces a 3‑D surface image that is analyzed to compute a pavement condition index (PCI).
Key details: the city reported a current citywide PCI of 86 (on a 0–100 scale), and staff noted Sammamish maintains about 415 lane miles of public roads. Funding currently supporting pavement work includes the transportation fund (about $1.8 million targeted to reconstruction) and an overlay/street fund (about $3.5 million for overlays and related treatments); staff also budgeted roughly $200,000 for the consultant work to complete the strategic plan. The plan will model alternative maintenance strategies (for example, crack sealing, overlays, and possible use of micro‑seals or slurry seals) to extend pavement service life at lower cost.
Equity and prioritization: staff described a criticality matrix to help distinguish between candidate streets with similar PCI scores by scoring road classification (arterial vs. collector/local), high‑use attributes (schools, parks, transit stops, commercial areas) and equity indicators (census and service‑access overlays selected with the city’s Racial Equity Team). Streets with multiple high‑use or equity indicators will receive higher aggregate priority when PCI scores are similar, staff said.
Schedule and next steps: data collection and the street‑selection methodology are complete; staff are finalizing the community engagement plan and expect a draft strategic plan in January with final adoption in early 2026. The plan will ask council to set PCI targets (citywide and by road class) and will be reflected in the six‑year CIP and the November budget amendment materials.
Council questions and context: Council members asked about PCI comparators, how a selected PCI goal would be communicated to the public, and how the plan coordinates overlays with ADA ramp upgrades, stormwater work and bicycle‑pedestrian priorities. Staff said the plan and the November CIP materials will include project lists and photos for comparison, and they offered to schedule field visits to illustrate what different PCI scores look like on the ground.
Ending: The city will return with the draft strategic plan, recommended PCI targets and a community outreach summary early next year; staff said the plan is intended to increase transparency about trade‑offs between maintenance, rehabilitation and other street improvements.
