The New Brunswick Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (NBDTI) has over 1,700 km of designated unsurfaced roads totalling more than 3,100 km in length. The majority of these roads are low volume roads in rural environments and serve various functions including access to residences, resources, and seasonal recreation. Until recently, the Department did not have a formal system to document and manage the function of these roads or their physical condition. This lack of information represented a gap in the Department’s asset management system. As a first step in quantifying the function and condition of its unsurfaced roads, the Department retained Exp Services to develop a procedure for classifying and rating the unsurfaced road network and to determine what level of upgrades are required to meet a desired standard. This paper describes the development of the classification and rating system and presents a number of interesting results regarding the inventory of the Province’s unsurfaced road network. It also presents a number of challenges and limitations encountered. It is the intent that the information and experiences presented in this paper will be of interest to other jurisdictions attempting to better manage their inventory of low volume roads.
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