Photo by Jon Anderson.
The city of Hoover is conducting a new assessment of the city’s roads to determine which ones need repaving the most.
The project involves having two people drive a van around all 482 miles of city streets and use a laser scanner to evaluate road conditions, City Engineer Scott Promer said. Previously, a city employee drove the roads and subjectively rated them on a scale of 1 to 5. This new process will be more objective because of the laser scanner and will automatically feed into the city’s geographic information system and color-code roads according to their condition, Promer said.
The scanner also will help the city keep an inventory of other city assets along the roads, including traffic signals, streetlights, sidewalks, curbs, ramps, signs, pavement markings, drainage structures and guardrails, he said.
The road assessment will cost $150,000, but $120,000 of that is coming from a grant provided by the Alabama Department of Transportation.
The Hoover City Council approved the project in late August. Driving all the roads was expected to take less than two weeks, and building a computer dashboard regarding pavement conditions was expected to take another month to six weeks, Promer said.
Dashboards for other city assets could be developed in the future on an as-needed basis, he said.
The City Council also recently approved about $230,000 of unexpected costs associated with the expansion of the National Computer Forensics Institute at the Hoover Public Safety Center. The total cost of that project is more than $21 million.
