APTech’s Transportation Asset Management Program: helping agencies make the most of what they have through better investment decisions
APTech’s Transportation Asset Management Program Manager Brad Allen, P.E.
Continuing our spotlight series highlighting APTech’s new program areas, today we are focusing the spotlight on our Transportation Asset Management Program. This area of APTech supports clients with all aspects of asset management, including life-cycle planning, financial planning, risk management, change management, and implementation. Brad Allen, P.E., APTech’s Transportation Asset Management Program Manager, took time to expound on his department’s work, clientele, and evolving trends in the industry.
What does the Transportation Asset Management Program do?
The Asset Management Group supports federal, state, and local agency clients. Our work focuses on combining engineering and economic data to help highway owners make better investment decisions. Our team has a diverse skill set, and we are geographically dispersed. The group is diverse, both in terms of skills sets and geographic location—with team members on both coasts and in between. We work closely with other APTech departments, including Pavement Design & Evaluation, Applied Research & Deployment, and Training, as our work often crosses over with their areas of focus. We support our clients with a wide variety of projects related to strategic planning, change management, data analysis and modeling, research, training, meeting facilitation, and much more.
What does this group deliver for our clients and employees?
Much of our work is in helping State DOTs meet Federal requirements for developing and updating Asset Management Plans (AMPs) every 4 years. AMPS are required to include information on pavements and bridges on the National Highway System but can include other parts of the highway network or other asset classes like culverts, walls, or tunnels.
Since 2013, APTech has supported 16 different State DOTs in developing more than 30 FHWA-certified AMPS. These plans lay out the procedures DOTs follow to use pavement and bridge condition data to drive long-term investment strategies.
It may seem obvious to pavement engineers that States would want to do this, but historically, most investment decisions have been made with little analysis. There tends to be a focus on big “ribbon-cutting” projects that enhance the system, with comparatively little attention paid to things like pavement preservation or bridge maintenance.
Without documented procedures, these essential activities can get lost in the shuffle, causing systems to decline and expensive backlogs of work to accumulate. Our team works with State DOTs to help them document and implement procedures that ensure critical maintenance and preservation work is considered alongside more glamorous projects when programming decisions are made.
What asset management challenges are agencies facing nowadays?
The biggest threat to asset management is increasing construction costs with stagnant or decreasing budgets. As States tighten their belts, maintenance and preservation projects are easy to delay or cut from programs. We are working with several clients to demonstrate the long-term impact of delaying these important activities.
What industry trends are you seeing these days?
We are seeing asset management gaining traction with other modes and with a broader array of highway assets. For example, we were recently selected by the North Dakota DOT to update their AMP, this time to include culverts and operational assets such as Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) hardware, signs, and markings. We also have an on-call contract to provide asset management support to the Tennessee DOT’s Aeronautics Division.
In addition, we are seeing more and more interest in asset management from commercial airports and local governments. We are working closely with APTech’s other groups so we can determine the best ways to support current and potential clients in meeting their asset management goals.
This continues our series where we feature our five new program areas at APTech. In each installment, leaders from these departments discuss their work and their program’s place in the future of pavement engineering, research, training, and asset management.
Learn more about our Transportation Asset Management work.