City of Kingston conducting road condition testing
You may have already seen this vehicle winding its way through Kingston streets over the past few weeks: a white utility van with flashing yellow lights, a simple logo with the letters IMS, and warning stickers on the back saying “test vehicle” and instructing other drivers to “stay back 20 feet”.
But despite the rather ominous look of the vehicle, it’s performing a relatively routine job. The Infrastructure Management Services vehicle is conducting a comprehensive road condition survey on behalf of the City.
This survey, which is conducted on a schedule of approximately every 3 years, gathers data on the condition of Kingston’s roads, which will be used to inform future road construction and maintenance planning.
The vehicle, called a Road Surface Tester (RST), is capable of automatically collecting a multitude of pavement condition data in a single pass by using lasers, distance measuring instruments, accelerometers, gyroscopes, GPS and a plethora of high resolution cameras.
With this arsenal of equipment, the vehicle collects data on the pavement surface’s levels of distress, roughness, and rutting for later analysis.
Once the data is collected and compiled, it is then used by the municipality to prioritize road repairs in the future.
This year’s road condition survey has an approximate cost of $90,000. The City expects the data gathering to be completed by November.
Maybe check Shaw Street!!!
Please drive down the hill that connects Union to King and down Johnson Street!!
Hope she drove up Kingscourt!
Will the road tester PLEASE go down both Johnson and Brock streets? They are both rollercoaster roads that damage your suspension!!
WHAT A JOKE , YOU DON’T NEED TO SPEND 90 GRAND ON A ROAD SURVEY WHEN IT IS PLAINLY OBVIOUS OF THE PATHETIC STATE ALL THE MAJOR ARTERIES ARE IN THIS TOWN.
Kingston roads are the worst roads I’ve ever driven on in a city, anywhere in Canada or USA. Shame on Kingston! Where are those tax dollars going.
To $90,000 road surveys. It said so in the article. ; )
Why would you need an inspector for something this obvious? Just take a drive down literally any one way street in kingston and you would see the issue
Holy Crap, I would have done it for 5,,000 with my Ford F150 and a Tim Horton’s coffee. You can’t drive downtown without wearing your coffee.
Having been married to someone who worked for Shell all his life I asked him why the roads would get in such bad shape after just a few years. He said it’s because municipalities/governments are too cheap to pay for high quality asphalt. The better the asphalt the longer it will last but as they say you get what you pay for.