AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty

TotalPave gathers reliable street-quality data with nothing but a smartphone.

Some students struggle to stay awake in their college civil engineering course. Coady Cameron was starting a business. In 2012, during his fourth year, Cameron was learning how cities collect information about their street infrastructure. Turns out many road departments hire high-priced consulting firms to parachute into town and drive around in a van that tracks roughness by sending a laser into the pavement. “I was like, I can collect this data with what’s in my back pocket right now,” recalls Cameron. “Why are they using these big expensive pieces of equipment?” CityFixer Solutions for an Urbanizing World Go In time that insight grew into a company co-founded with brother Drew called TotalPave. The Canadian startup, based in the New Brunswick capital of Fredericton, has figured out a way to make reliable road-quality assessments using just a smartphone. Ultimately Cameron believes TotalPave can help thousands of small and midsized cities gather all the data they need to keep local streets in great shape at a fraction of the cost charged by big firms. “The problem is not that municipal engineers don’t know how to maintain the roads and streets in their network,” he said during the 2016 TRB Six Minute Pitch competition, an annual contest for transportation startups, which TotalPave won. “It’s that they simply cannot afford the services that provide objective road-condition data that allows them to make the important paving decisions.”

More than just potholes Timing matters when it comes to pavement. Roads don’t wear down at a perfectly gradual rate; after a certain point, says Cameron, there’s a steep drop-off in condition. Fixing a road before that cliff can be the difference between low-cost minor maintenance and pricy major reconstruction. Part of the reason the U.S. and (to a lesser extent) Canada face such costly infrastructure crises today is that officials have deferred so much street repair. Big cities can shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for their own road-quality vans or pay high consulting fees, but smaller ones can only afford to bring in the professionals every few years. As a result they might rely on less-objective data to fill the gaps and run the risk of missing those critical maintenance windows. But Cameron estimates that TotalPave provides a similar service at 15-to-20 times less than a typical one-time road assessment. The reason is simple: the TotalPave package requires little more than a smartphone. Right now the company offers two services. One is called TotalPave IRI, short for International Roughness Index. Local road managers can load the program onto a phone, mount it to any “road-worthy vehicle,” press the big green button, and start cruising around town. The IRI program logs accelerometer data from the phone’s micro-movements and pairs it with GPS data and any prior road conditions input into the system to spit out a single value of infrastructure quality.

“A rougher road is going to cause the vehicle to vibrate more,” says Cameron. “We’re looking for really, really small undulations. We’re not looking for potholes and huge dips and what-not. It’s a lot finer detail.” The other product is TotalPave PCI, short for Pavement Condition Index. A street surveyor in the field can punch in standard road distresses—anything from a longitudinal transverse crack to a one-foot-deep pothole—and automatically get a PCI value in return. Anyone can be trained to use the program in half an hour, says Cameron, meaning cities can have an intern do the task rather than spending money on an outside consultant or taking up time from a salaried staff engineer.