Transportation Asset Management is in Need of a Dependable Foundation

As transportation owners move to manage assets in risk-informed ways, they are well served by a dependable foundation. What is meant here is not whether asset foundations are well built, but how reliably their future state can be predicted. Here we focus on ground movement, where most change is episodic and results from rare events, with the rarest events causing the most change, for example, through earthquakes, floods, and landslides. For other processes, change is more gradual and yet still occurs at a meaningful rate. Wide-area observations through aerial lidar and satellite InSAR are revealing this. A dependable Transportation Asset Management (TAM) foundation is a process where this is understood spatially and reflected in models of future performance related to safety, dependability, and cost. Another reason TAM needs a dependable foundation is so that observations made by others can be put into context. Not long ago, essentially all asset performance data and their changes were collected by the owner. Now, crowdsourcing of observations, consortiums of local owners for aerial lidar and national governments for InSAR, are ways in which observations on performance are being made by other people or interests. Owners can now find themselves being the last to know about changes to their assets rather than the first to know. In this sense, a dependable TAM foundation is a platform that provides opportunity to build from these observations, and not get turned around by them. International examples presented here demonstrate the value of a dependable TAM foundation.