Sioux Falls Steps into Advanced Age of Street Maintenance
“That’s the way we’ve always done it” is not how the City of Sioux Falls approaches its streets. Using cutting-edge technology will bring a new era to maintaining infrastructure.
A combination of lasers and cameras will replace the human eyeball to compile what Sioux Falls street conditions currently are. The goal is to do the job accurately and efficiently.
According to Wes Philips, Principal Streets Engineer, Sioux Falls has multiple strategies to maintaining the roads.
“Streets that are in good shape are a lot easier to keep in good shape.”
It’s similar to regular maintenance on a house or car.
The City of Sioux Falls is contracting with Infrastructure Management Services, traveling every street in the city collecting data to gauge the current condition. Civil Engineer Nick Borns says technology will improve the success rate of finding the problems.
“What they are able to do is use state-of-the-art laser and camera technologies to provide automated information on what our street conditions are.”
Over the next seven weeks the data will give a baseline for the current street conditions and Borns says the information will be a valuable tool in projecting which streets will need attention.
“This gives us potentially an opportunity to have more consistent data and possibly even more accurate data to be able to analyze the conditions of our streets and be able to implement our maintenance programs based off the information.”
This technology has been used in the area before. Minnehaha County and the City of Brandon have utilized the services of Infrastructure Services. Other peer communities such as Lincoln, Nebraska and Fargo, North Dakota are also using this system to maintain streets.
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