The British Standards Institution (BSI) has issued the PAS 2161:2024 , an all new specification for the collection and reporting of road condition data.
It says PAS 2161 marks a pivotal change in measuring local road network conditions, introducing updated data protocols that will be used by Local Authorities to report data to central government for publication in official statistics, such as national reporting of road condition.
The new protocols present exciting opportunities for Local Authorities to innovate and achieve efficiency in data collection.
PAS 2161 applies to locally-managed classified (A, B, C) and unclassified (U) roads in England. It specifies the road condition monitoring (RCM) data that should be collected for national reporting on road network condition but does not specify the technologies to be used for the collection of RCM data.
Dr Alex Wright, the technical author of PAS 2161 said: “This specification is the result of extensive collaboration among stakeholders across the data collection industry, local authorities and the Department for Transport (DfT) who have worked over the past three years to establish an entirely new approach to RCM (RCM Network Study for PAS2161). We are also extremely grateful to the local authority engineers who assisted with the network study that validated our approach.”
BSI says one of the benefits of PAS 2161 is that it allows LAs greater flexibility in selecting the technologies they can use to collect road condition data than are available to them under the current SCANNER mandate. This allows for the integration of new technologies as they become available and affordable.
In addition to assisting LAs in meeting the requirements for national reporting of their network road condition, the RCM data collected under PAS 2161 will also make recommendations for wider use of the data in local highway asset management, maximising the value of the data collected.
To ensure consistency in data quality, any RCM provider that provides data to a LA for national reporting under the requirements of PAS 2161 will need to demonstrate the performance of their data collection technology.
As there are several RCM providers with new technologies with the potential to deliver PAS 2161 compliant data, the DfT is funding demonstration tests that will compare the RCM data reported by these technologies with benchmark data collected by local authority engineers. The demonstration tests will be a larger scale version of the network study undertaken in Surrey between June and August 2023, expanding the tests to a wider range of locations in England to provide the variation in road type, condition and geography that is required to fully test these systems.
Technologies that meet the performance standards outlined in PAS 2161 will be awarded the status of “demonstrated”.
RCM technology providers that are capable of meeting the requirements of PAS 2161 are invited to participate in the demonstrations in 2025 by contacting TRL at [email protected].
TRL are also keen to recruit LA highways engineers to assist with the trials. Participating engineers will acquire early hands-on experience with the PAS and will play a key role in actively contributing to its development as it progresses towards becoming a formal standard in 2026.
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(Picture – TRL/BSI)
