City and County of Honolulu Pavement Condition Study

In 2011, the City and County of Honolulu Department of Facility Maintenance (DFM) was looking for new, unique ways to effectively manage City and County-maintained streets. Researching exciting new imaging methodologies utilized by cities across the country, the CCH learned of Sam O. Hirota, Inc.'s earthmine™ system. A Request for Proposals was prepared and distributed detailing the DFM's main goals:

1. Update the City's pavement management system incorporating automatically collected geographic information and 3D spherical, panoramic, and measureable street condition imagery,
2. Make the images accessible to City and County Departments to create an efficient, safe, and cost-effective asset/infrastructure management system.  

Sam O. Hirota, Inc. (SOH) was engaged as the prime contractor in June 2012 to provide pavement condition inspection/analysis and images of all 3,650 lane miles of City-maintained roads. The images would be collected using SOH's earthmine Mars Collection System, the only vehicle of its kind in Hawaii and only one of 20 in the world. Images would then be made available to DFM personnel through an earthmine plug-in to the familiar City and County ArcGIS software interface. 

The project was completed by Sam O. Hirota, Inc. on time and on budget. DFM planners could now efficiently and cost-effectively validate street conditions from the safety of their workstations without the necessity of time-consuming manual field verification. Up-to-date pavement conditions now provided a baseline from which informed remediation and preventative actions could take place. Overall, the project provided safer streets for all Oahu drivers and a progressive, sustainable plan for more effective management of one of Honolulu's most valuable assets. 

The City and County was extremely pleased with the results of the 2012 project. So pleased, in fact, that SOH was contracted to perform a similar inspection in 2014. This 

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