Long-Term Bridge Performance High Priority Bridge Performance Issues

CHAPTER 2. STAKEHOLDER INPUT—STATE TRANSPORTATION DEPARTMENT FOCUS GROUPS

Early and continual involvement by bridge owners in the development and implementation of the LTBP Program was deemed to be critically important to the success of the program. At an early stage in the development phase, three issues were identified for which input from bridge owners was important to the pursuit of the development phase tasks. First was the need to determine what aspects of bridge performance were most important to the owners and then to determine what gaps existed in their understanding of these aspects of bridge performance. That information is the focus of this report. Second was the need to examine what information and data owners currently had for use in their decisionmaking processes and to identify where there were critical gaps. Third was to understand their decisionmaking process and business practices to help identify what products the LTBP Program could develop that would best assist bridge owners in managing their bridge programs. That information was used internally by FHWA.

The approach selected to collect this information was to hold a series of focus groups across a number of geographically distributed States. The best source of the required information was deemed to be the State transportation departments. Therefore, focus group meetings were designed to allow interviews with a group of bridge inspectors, engineers, and managers from each of the selected States. As a result of the meetings, valuable information was obtained on performance issues of concern, data needs, performance measures that the transportation departments currently use, and what those departments saw as desired outcomes of the program. Detailed records of the meeting discussions are included in appendix B.

FOCUS GROUP OBJECTIVES

A focus group interview process was adopted to assist the team in achieving the following objectives:

1. Develop an understanding of how representative States manage and track bridge performance.
   
   
2. Identify the most common concerns and the most costly activities of the representative States in maintaining, repairing, rehabilitating, and replacing bridges.
   
   
3. Determine what data the States currently collect and use for their decisionmaking processes and what gaps they see in their currently available data.
   
   
4. Identify the aspects of bridge performance on which the States would like the program to focus.

PROCESS

The first step was to develop a practical process to solicit the assistance of State transportation department bridge personnel (experts in bridge design, inspection, maintenance, preservation, and management) in gathering information about the processes they use and the activities they carry out related to bridge performance. To develop a program that is grounded in the real world of bridge engineering, input was needed from experienced bridge practitioners. State transportation department input was obtained to help ensure that the LTBP Program would provide practical data and results that practitioners could use in managing the performance of bridge inventories and to allow State transportation departments to share with the FHWA what they believe is needed.

It was agreed that the focus groups should represent owners of a geographically, economically, and environmentally diverse cross section of State transportation departments because they represent a majority of the custodians of the national bridge inventory. Six regions were designated across the continental United States; table2 presents the list of State transportation departments ultimately selected from each region.

Table 2. List of focus group States by region.

Figure 2 presents the geographic distribution of State transportation departments identified for focus group participation.

Figure 2. Map. Participating State transportation departments.

In 2008, focus group meetings were conducted in Virginia, California, New Jersey, New York, and Florida. In 2009, focus group meetings were conducted in Minnesota, Utah, Texas, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Ohio, Alabama, Illinois, and Kansas. State transportation department bridge personnel were asked to come to the meetings ready to discuss the following:

• Organizational structure and processes within the transportation department relative to bridge funding, design, management, inspection, and maintenance programming.
  
  
• The 5 to10 most common forms of deterioration, damage, or functional issues faced in maintaining, repairing, or rehabilitating highway bridges.
  
  
• The 5 to10 most common bridge maintenance, repair, or rehabilitation activities on which the State transportation department expends the most resources, with estimates of man-hours and funds spent on each annually.

The focus groups discussed specific modes of deterioration for bridge decks, superstructures, substructures, and ancillary systems, as well as functional and operational aspects of bridge management. Focus group meetings concentrated on the following:

• State transportation department organizational structure relative to bridge management and bridge maintenance, the roles of the relevant groups or divisions within their department, and how those groups made decisions and shared information.
  
  
• Each group discussed State transportation department bridge management systems, including the policies, processes, and procedures for program-level management of the bridge inventory within its organization. This included overviews of the system(s) in place for collecting, housing, and reporting bridge inventory, condition, activities, and expenditures. In general, each group was asked to identify the information and sources transportation departments perceived as most useful for program-level decision support.
  
  
• Performance measures used by the State transportation department to gauge the success of the bridge management program and at what levels.
  
  
• The most common forms of deterioration and damage on the transportation department’s bridges, what information the department used to evaluate condition(s) and what information it used to develop feasible solutions. Generally, the responses were grouped into categories by general structural components of the bridge, including decks, superstructure, substructure, ancillary systems, and also a nonstructural functional category.
  
  
• The most common maintenance activities the State transportation department performed and the information they had to base their choice of feasible solutions.
  
  
• Innovative policies, or new techniques or tools, that had been implemented and that the State transportation department felt had been successful.
  
  
• Outcomes the State transportation department would like to see from the LTBP Program.

Appendix A contains the specific questions asked of the focus groups. Interviews were taped and transcribed and notes were summarized. The information gathered served as a guide in identifying high priority performance issues.

KEY FINDINGS

Appendix B outlines the detailed results from the respective focus group interviews. Representatives of 5 transportation departments indicated that their departments had a centralized organizational structure for managing the bridge inventory, whereas 10 indicated such operations were distributed among operating districts or other decentralized units.

An National Bridge Inventory (NBI) bridge is defined as any structure on a public highway that meets the NBI definition of a bridge: A structure including supports erected over a depression or an obstruction, such as water, highway, or railway, and having a track or passageway for carrying traffic or other moving loads, and having an opening measured along the center of the roadway of more than 20 ft between undercopings of abutments or spring lines of arches, or extreme ends of openings for multiple boxes; it may also include multiple pipes, where the clear distance between openings is less than half of the smaller contiguous opening.⁽¹⁾ At the time the interviews were conducted, representatives of 12 State transportation departments indicated that they collect AASHTOWare Bridge Management® software element-level condition information during their periodic inspections of NBI bridges, and 3transportation departments did not. The representative of one transportation department indicated that the department was awaiting the release of the new national bridge elements definitions, which were expected to replace the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Commonly Recognized (CoRe) element definitions.⁽²⁾ The other three States collect NBI condition ratings but do not collect element-level condition information.⁽³⁾

Table 3 provides information regarding the bridge inventories in the focus group States and whether they collect element-level inspection data on their bridges.

Each transportation department was asked to identify bridge performance issues it experienced on decks, superstructures, and substructures. Table 4 indicates which transportation departments experienced certain performance issues related to bridge decks. The Alabama Department of Transportation (ADOT) did not report any performance issues with decks.

Table 5 indicates the transportation departments that experienced certain performance issues related to bridge superstructures. All of the transportation departments that were interviewed reported at least one performance issue with superstructures.

Table 6 indicates the transportation departments that experienced certain performance issues related to bridge substructures. The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT-OR) did not identify any specific performance problems related to substructures. (Note that the Ohio and Oregon State transportation departments both use the formal abbreviation ODOT. To avoid confusion, this report uses the abbreviation ODOT-OR for the Oregon agency.)

Table 3. State transportation department bridge inventory and management structure.

Table 4. State transportation department reported issues related to decks.

Table 5. State transportation department reported issues related to superstructures.

Table 6. State transportation department reported issues related to substructures.

Each State transportation department was asked to identify any issues related to functional performance of their bridges. As table 7 shows, only five State transportation departments identified any specific performance problems related to functional issues.

Table 7. State transportation department reported issues related to functional issues.

Functional issues represent a safety hazard (such as a narrow bridge or a poor alignment between bridge and approach roadway) or affect traffic capacity (such as insufficient lanes).

Performance Measures

Many of the State transportation departments interviewed use performance measures by which to evaluate the effectiveness of their bridge programs. These performance measures generally fall into one of three types. The first type of measure counts the number of bridges or total deck area of bridges that meet a defined standard such as “structurally deficient.” Alternatively, the measure may be number of bridges or total deck area of bridges that are rated to be in “good,” “fair,” or “poor” condition. In this rating system “good” usually means bridges with an NBI condition rating of 9, 8, or 7; “fair” means bridges with an NBI condition rating of 6 or 5; and “poor” means bridges with an NBI condition rating of 4 or below.

A second approach is to count the number of bridges or total deck area of bridges that have a defined minimum value on a defined index such as the Federal Sufficiency Rating. A third approach tracks completion of items that have been identified as needing maintenance or repair.

Several States use multiple measures. Note that these measures do not, by and large, directly measure the performance of individual bridge engineering, maintenance, and management actions or strategies. Some of the program performance measures in use are listed in table 8.

Table 8 . Performance measures identified by focus groups.