Asset Management

Utah’s transportation system is one of its most valuable assets totaling over $45 Billion. Significant to both our local and national movement of people and goods, it must be managed in a manner to help strengthen Utah’s economy and enhance the quality of life of its residents.

Asset Management is a performance and risk-based investment decision process for cost-effective management for operating, maintaining, upgrading, and expanding physical assets effectively over their life cycle. Asset Management is based on reliable, repeatable quality data, along with well-defined objectives that align with UDOT’s strategic goals. This unified program maximizes system performance and funding.

Check out the Roadview Explorer App to view UDOT’s routes and assets.

The Utah Transportation Asset Management Plan (TAMP)

The TAMP is what UDOT follows to achieve the preservation of the state’s transportation infrastructure. The specific objectives of this plan are:

Formalize a data driven performance and risk-based approach for allocating transportation funds to manage pavements, bridges, ATMS (ITS), and signal devices
Incorporate asset management into intermediate and long-range planning processes
Incorporate risk management into resource allocation decisions
Provide a valuable asset management tool with real time data

Asset Management Approach

To accomplish the objective of allocating transportation funding toward the most valuable assets and those with the highest risk to system operation, the UDOT Asset Advisory/Performance Management Committees developed a tiered system of asset management. UDOT uses this tiered system to preserve, rehabilitate, and maintain the transportation physical assets. Three tiers have been established based on the importance of the asset to UDOT’s performance plan and strategic goals:

Tier 1 assets are managed with performance measures and targets
Tier 2 assets are managed with condition and risk
Tier 3 assets are managed reactively within funding availability and assessed risk
Asset Register shows the management approach

Federal Measures and Targets

Federal performance measures were required by MAP-21 to enable a federal summary and comparison between states.
Targets have been established for the pavement and bridge performance measures established by FHWA for the National Highway System.

Federal Performance Measures

State Measures and Targets

UDOT has established state performance measures and targets for pavement, bridges, ATMS (ITS) devices, and signal systems. Transportation funds and work effort are allocated to these tier 1 assets based on systematic improvement or maintenance of asset condition and value.

State Performance Measures

Detailed Funding

UDOT Asset Management’s Funding Sources

UDOT relies on the federal funding process, state annual budget process, and distribution decision by the Transportation Commission for transportation funding. Funding availability varies each year depending on national and state economies and priorities of decision makers.

Historically, funds come from three specific areas:

State Transportation Investment Fund
State Transportation Fund
Federal Funds

Strategic Direction Funding

UDOT’s Statewide Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) is a six year plan of highway and transit project for the State of Utah. The STIP is maintained daily and includes transportation projects on the state, city, and county highway systems, as well as projects in the national parks, national forests and state funding programs.

The STIP Program App contains a more detailed overview of how programs are funding for the next three years.

Cross Assets

Goals and Objectives

UDOT is currently in the process of developing a performance-based cross-asset allocation framework. A short term goal is Cross Asset Prioritization between Bridges and Pavements. The long term goal is Cross Asset Prioritization between all other tier 1 assets. An Asset Management/Maintenance Management System will serve as a foundation for future cross-asset data integration and decision making capabilities.

Background

UDOT has developed a performance based, cross-investment framework approach to evaluating the impacts of STIP projects on the MAP-21 national measures. Recognizing that transportation projects are multi-faceted; a framework has been developed to holistically analyze candidate projects against a full range of benefits, regardless of which program the project was proposed under.

This framework consists of:

Conflating geospatial safety, pavement, bridge, and reliability data sets with project locations
Predicting how underlying statewide and project-level performance would vary over time without funding
Determining the scopes-of-work from project classification and description fields
Applying project impact models across the performance areas given the scope-of-work
Leveraging multiple objective decision analysis to evaluate what projects could be added at varying funding levels
Reporting the corresponding expected performance levels for varying investment strategies so as to inform target-setting

Next steps include studying how the cross-investment approach could be refined, adapted and applied to state measures in addition to demonstrating how the STIP and investment strategies may impact federal measures associated with the TAMP, SHSP, and LRTP.

Risk

UDOT has developed a Data Driven Model-Based Risk Management System. Click here to learn more.