The report describes the work carried out to develop methods to interpret road shape of local roads, with the overall project objectives being: - To identify how automatic measurements of the road shape of local roads can be analysed to measure and report road condition in relation to road user requirements, particularly with respect to road safety, road service level and maintenance requirements. - To develop automatic techniques or methods for measuring and recording the aspects of the road shape suitable for incorporation in an overall assessment of road condition and maintenance need. - To provide a workable specification for the methods or techniques so that they may be implemented in survey vehicles for SCANNER surveys from 2007. - To determine methods for testing the successful implementation of the technique by any suitably qualified organisation, and methods for carrying out ongoing Quality Assurance checks on the methods. It was desirable to identify the aspects of the pavement shape that cause particular concern to the road user, therefore a practical programme of research was carried out. Surveys were undertaken using instrumented vehicles to obtain a measure of user opinion in the areas of general ride and bumpiness. The vehicles included cars, a motorcycle and a push bike. The records of user opinion were compared with longitudinal profile measurements obtained using a survey vehicle (HARRIS1) and the data used to develop measures of general ride and bumpiness from the longitudinal profile data. The report describes the development of these methods, and presents a number of conclusions. (Author/publisher)
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