THE RATING AND MEASURING OF ROAD ROUGHNESS

A study has been carried out aiming, in part, to elucidate the significance of road roughness for road-users' experience of comfort and, in part, to find an objective method for measuring road roughness. Thirty subjects in the preliminary experiment and forty in the main experiment rated their experience of comfort on twenty road sections representing varying degrees of smoothness to roughness conditions. The results of the ratings were partly used to evaluate the appropriateness of the ISO comfort standard in connection with road use and partly to evaluate four different kinds of road meters. The results showed that the road- users accepted longer exposure time for road roughness on roads of relative smoothness than what would be expected from the ISO reduced comfort boundary. As for rougher roads, the estimated acceptance time approached the ISO boundary. Three of the four road meters which were used produced results well in accordance with the results from the subjective ratings. The recommended road meter is the so-called PCA Road Meter but there is reason to consider whether a Road Roughness Indicator or a Bump Integrator equipped with the measuring system of the PCA Road Meter would not be a still better alternative than the present PCA Road Meter. This construction, however, has not been studied in the present experiment.

Corporate Authors:
Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI)

Linköping, Sweden SE-581 95
Authors:
- MAGNUSSON, G
- Arnberg, P W
Publication Date: 1976

Media Info

Features: Figures; References;
Pagination: 45 p.

Subject/Index Terms

TRT Terms: Comfort; Measurement; Measuring instruments; Pavements; Ratings; Road meters; Roughness; Travelers
Old TRIS Terms: Pca meter
Subject Areas: Highways; Pavements; Society;

Filing Info

Accession Number: 00149811
Record Type: Publication
Source Agency: National Technical Information Service
Report/Paper Numbers: Report No. 83A
Files: TRIS, ATRI
Created Date: May 11 1977 12:00AM