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While I think the general idea is good, the subjective system has lots
of variables from person to person, and I don't think it would work so
well.
I agree. I believe a poll with a scale could alleviate the problem of
subjectivity, but I agree the exercise is subjective. Maybe a simple
good, bad, needs repair scale would suffice.
Something like this has been proposed before on the main TALK list -- if
I recall correctly, it was called "smoothness" or something similar.
If you could figure out some objective way to assess the status of a
road, or even if there was a way to simply put in descriptors (one
pothole, 2-5 potholes, 10+ potholes in this X km/miles) it could be
much more useful.
There are tons of objective measures one can do. Just drop by on a
pavement software vendor web site and you will find plenty of indexes.
My understanding is that decision makers in the end rely on some
"overall condition index" to rank the road segments in need of repair.
This OCI can be made up of the linear combination of indexes you want
from the road itself (e.g. number of longitudinal cracks per unit area,
number of potholes per unit area ...) and from construction information
(age of pavement, history of rehabilitation work, etc.). Of course
OSM'ers only have access to the former set of parameters so we could
think of an OOCI ("Observable Overall Condition Index") that would be
some (weighted) linear combination of a bunch of observable indexes
which we would have to determine. I think this could be worked out, but
I believe a simpler approach based primarily on the "smoothness of ride"
could be easier to devise. When you can't reach the speed limit on a
given road section in fear of wrecking your suspension or banging your
head, it's a sign that smoothness is bad. Of course that is an extreme
case ;-).
Thanx for your comments,
Yves
Thanks,
Gerald.
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