Pavement Condition Index (PCI)

A PCI survey follows ASTM D6433. A surveyor inspects sample units of a pavement section and records each distress by type, severity, and extent - cracking (alligator, longitudinal, transverse, block), rutting, potholes, raveling, patching, and others. Each distress reduces the score by a calculated deduct value rather than a flat amount, so a few severe potholes can hurt the score more than widespread minor cracking. The deducts are combined into a corrected value that produces the final 0-100 PCI for the section. Because the method is standardized, results are repeatable between surveyors and comparable year over year.

PCI matters because cost is not linear with condition. While a section sits high in the good or satisfactory bands, cheap preventive maintenance - crack sealing, surface treatments - holds it there for years. As PCI falls into fair and then poor, the affordable preventive window closes and the work shifts to rehabilitation; once a section reaches very poor or failed, full reconstruction is often the only option and the cost per lane-kilometre rises steeply. The goal of pavement management is "right treatment, right road, right time" - spending on roads that are still cheap to save, rather than only on the ones that have already failed.

PCI almost never originates in your asset system - a survey vendor collects it and delivers a spreadsheet keyed to road sections. The challenge is getting those scores back onto the right features without re-keying. AssetLab supports an update-mode import that matches the spreadsheet to existing road sections, writes a PCI inspection record against each one, and refreshes the condition history. The PCI value becomes the feature condition that feeds the length-weighted Network Condition Index, so each survey cycle updates both the section-level detail and the network-level trend in one import.