[GIS] Recommendations for road maintenance management (on a small scale)

roadsoftware-recommendationstransportation

I am in a road association and we maintain our own 3 mile dirt road. In doing research on best practices for maintenance I discovered that other organizations use some mapping/GIS programs to help.

I know very little about GIS in general and wonder what would be good resources to start with.

More specifically, is there a generic program I can use to create a map of the road, then use it to collaborate with others to track issues with the road, map points on it and keep a history of maintenance?

If not, is there a base for this kind of thing and can a developer build one in a reasonable amount of time? I am a software developer and would b more than happy to spend time on this project if that is required to get different pieces working.

The road is in Vermont.

EDIT:

Basically what I am hoping for is the following:

  • Software that allows me to drive a specific route and store that as a working model.
  • Download some GPS/County information to automagically set elevations, etc.
  • Allow multiple people to use the software and share information
  • Look at historical data over time (e.g. locations of potholes, bad ice, washboarding in a certain year or month – and view that as a report) – or some other means of collecting and storing data sets and keeping them distinct in time.

Please disabuse me of any unreasonable expectations or educate me on what I should be looking for.

Best Answer

I'll try to analyze your use cases from a QGIS perspective:

Software that allows me to drive a specific route and store that as a working model.

There is a GPS Tool for live tracking of GPS devices. But I guess you could go with the simpler version of loading the recorded GPX files into QGIS after collection.

Download some GPS/County information to automagically set elevations, etc.

In the US, you have 1 degree (~ 30 m) SRTM data (height model) available. I'm sure there are other sources which I'm not aware of.

You can also use any WMS or WFS for your region.

Allow multiple people to use the software and share information

As long as you're not looking for a multi-user-level/permission solution, QGIS - especially together with PostGIS - can do that really well. There are solutions to keep data synchronized even if multiple people manipulate the same data at the same time.

Look at historical data over time (e.g. locations of potholes, bad ice, washboarding in a certain year or month - and view that as a report) - or some other means of collecting and storing data sets and keeping them distinct in time.

As mentioned before. I'd recommend PostGIS as a data store. For analysis of historical data, you might want to look into Time Manager plugin. But of course some simple filters (on time attributes) could work just as well for you.

Using Print Composer, you can create quite nice reports. Of course, developing the first report will take some trial and error but once your satisfied, you can save it as a template and reuse it easily.

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