Pavement Condition Assessments Using LiDAR
Using mobile LiDAR and 360° imagery, pavement condition assessment services deliver high-resolution data on road surfaces, cracks, and deformations to support maintenance planning, improve safety, and extend the lifespan of critical transportation infrastructure.
Faster Insights. Safer Surveys. Defensible Data.
Accurate pavement condition data is essential for making informed decisions about road maintenance, budgeting, and long-term infrastructure planning. For municipalities, relying on manual surveys or windshield inspections can result in inconsistent and subjective reporting, missed issues, and delayed project timelines. These older assessment methods often lack the precision and objectivity needed to support asset management plans, funding applications, and service level reporting.
Eagle Engineering and Consulting provides mobile pavement condition assessments using LiDAR and AI-supported image rating. This approach delivers reliable, network-wide data without requiring lane closures or having field crews walk roadways. The result is consistent pavement scoring, detailed condition mapping, and actionable data you can integrate directly into planning and reporting. This shows constituents that planning decisions are backed by objective insight.
How is LiDAR Technology Used for Road Surface Assessments?
LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, is a survey technology that uses laser pulses to measure the shape and texture of the road surface with high precision. By capturing millions of data points per second, it creates an accurate 3D model of every lane, shoulder, and roadside element. This level of detail helps identify centimetre-level issues that may be missed during visual inspections.
Eagle’s system uses a vehicle equipped with sophisticated LiDAR scanners and 360-degree cameras to scan your road network while driving at normal traffic speeds. The vehicle collects full-lane condition data along with surrounding features such as curbs, signs, vegetation, and drainage infrastructure. There’s no disruption to traffic and no need for flaggers or lane closures.
Once the scan is complete, our software analyzes the data to detect pavement distress and surface defects. These include alligator cracking, block cracking, longitudinal or transverse cracking, rutting, depressions, potholes, heaving, edge failures, shoving, surface wear, and more. Each issue is classified by type, severity, and extent, which supports accurate Pavement Condition Index (PCI) scoring and risk-based planning depending on the selected assessment standard. This data provides a clear, defensible view of your network’s condition based on the priorities and criteria that matter most to your project.
Are LiDAR Pavement Condition Assessments Better than Manual Surveys?
Mobile LiDAR assessments offer several advantages over traditional methods. Data is collected faster, processed more consistently, and classified using objective standards. You don’t have to rely on field crews making subjective visual calls, the results are repeatable over time, and data can be easily compared to previous scans.
Because our assessments are done from a moving vehicle, there’s little need to expose field crews to live traffic, inclement weather, or environmental hazards. Your team can focus on reviewing results and planning actions from anywhere instead of sending crews into the field for days. This helps reduce liability while increasing operational efficiency, communication, and data quality.
What is the Typical Timeline for Scanning Road Networks with LiDAR?
Eagle’s system is built for both urban and rural networks. In mid-sized cities, we can typically complete full network scans in one to two weeks, and towns in a few hours to a few days. In rural or regional areas, our teams can cover more than 100 kilometers per day, including paved and unpaved roads.
You choose the segmentation that fits your system, whether by block, route, lane, or kilometre. The data is structured to match your needs. We support one-time condition assessments, annual updates, monitoring, or rolling multi-year programs that follow your asset management plan and planning cycles.
Can LiDAR Scan Gravel and Unpaved Roads?
Gravel and unpaved roads also require condition monitoring, even if PCI scoring doesn’t apply. Our LiDAR system captures surface shape, relative slope, rutting, erosion, and drainage characteristics to help prioritize maintenance and track changes over time.
These datasets support decisions on grading, resurfacing, and seasonal maintenance, especially where budgets and public expectations are high. All files are delivered in formats compatible with your GIS or asset management system.
What Additional Infrastructure Data is Captured During a LiDAR Pavement Scan?
Each pavement scan captures much more than just a road network’s surface condition. It also records visible roadside infrastructure that can support other departments and asset inventories. In a single pass, we can collect and assess curbs, sidewalks, poles, trees, hydrants, paint lines, clearances, stopping lengths, line-of-sight, and signage.
This data collection approach allows different teams, such as public works, transportation, engineering, urban forestry, and utilities, to work from the same data set as a single source of truth. Using LiDAR instead of manual surveys to collect data reduces the need for duplicate fieldwork, improves internal coordination, simplifies planning across your organization, and provides a lasting record of your community’s asset.
Need Better Infrastructure Data in Less Time? Get in Touch for a Sample Report or Pilot Project
Eagle Engineering provides sample reports, technical demonstrations, and pilot projects to help municipalities evaluate the benefits of LiDAR-based assessments. If you want to improve data quality, reduce survey time, and align departments around a single source of truth, we’re ready to help.Â
Contact us to schedule a demo, request a quote, or set up a lunch and learn to see how our services can support your municipality’s infrastructure goals.Â
Why Eagle?
Experience
Our reality capture team is experts in pavement condition data collection, manual and AI asset extraction, GIS integration, pavement condition, and PCI scoring.
Advanced Technology
We use state-of-the-art fixed and mobile LiDAR and photogrammetry equipment to capture high-resolution data of urban and rural pavement and road networks.
Detailed Insights
We go beyond simple road data collection and analyze pavement assets using PCI scoring to identify potential issues, providing detailed reports with actionable recommendations.
Customized Solutions
We know that every pavement condition assessment project is unique. We tailor our approach to meet your specific road project needs, timelines, and budget.
Frequently Asked Questions About Pavement Road Condition Assessments
What is a pavement condition assessment?
A pavement condition assessment is a structured evaluation of the physical state of a road or sidewalk. It identifies and measures visible surface distress, such as cracks, rutting, and potholes, using visual inspection methods or advanced technologies like LiDAR.Â
Eagle Engineering and Consulting conducts pavement assessments across municipal, regional, and provincial road networks, delivering high-resolution, AI-leveraged data that supports long-term infrastructure planning, budgeting, and regulatory compliance.Â
What is the difference between pavement condition and road condition?
Pavement condition refers to the structural and surface-level integrity of the roadway itself, and focuses on issues like cracks, potholes, and pavement surface wear. In contrast, road condition is a broader term that also includes the surrounding environment, such as road markings, curbs, signage, drainage infrastructure, and roadway vegetation.Â
Pavement Conditions look at ‘how smooth the ride is,’ Road condition looks at the environment and its features as much as the road surface.Â
Using advanced mobile LiDAR and 360-degree imaging, Eagle captures both pavement and adjacent roadside features in every scan, providing clients with significant added value and cross-departmental insights even when the original project scope is focused solely on pavement condition.Â
Can you use LiDAR for Pavement Condition Index (PCI) assessments?
LiDAR technology is increasingly used to support Pavement Condition Index (PCI) evaluations by capturing detailed 3D surface data at roadway speeds. When paired with AI tools or machine learning, LiDAR enables the automated detection and measurement of surface defects such as longitudinal cracking, alligator cracking, potholes, rutting, and more.Â
Eagle leverages LiDAR and proprietary AI models to deliver PCI scoring and detailed condition reports, enabling municipalities and transportation agencies to make faster, evidence-based decisions for capital planning and maintenance programs.Â
How accurate is LiDAR for road condition assessments?
LiDAR provides highly accurate surface modeling for road condition assessments, typically achieving precision in the half-centimeter range depending on the sensor configuration. This high-resolution 3D data allows for the detailed detection of surface roughness, settlement, and other pavement irregularities.Â
Eagle’s mobile LiDAR systems are calibrated for large-scale pavement data collection, delivering reliable, repeatable results that integrate seamlessly with asset management platforms and GIS systems.
Can LiDAR be used for gravel or unpaved roads?
LiDAR is well-suited for assessing gravel, unpaved roads, and pathways. It captures dense 3D point cloud data that models surface roughness, erosion patterns, and road shape with a high degree of accuracy.Â
Eagle performs gravel road assessments using mobile LiDAR and 360-degree imaging to document surface conditions and structural issues. We provide the resulting data in the file formats required for your asset management, GIS, or planning systems.
What formats is the condition assessment data delivered in?
Eagle provides condition data in practical formats that integrate into the systems you already use. Typical outputs include PCI scores and distress logs (Excel spreadsheets,) shapefiles, GeoJSON, KML, printable map books, and more according to your needs. We also deliver custom exports matched to your segmentation model, road naming conventions, or GIS layers.Â
Our team ensures that everything is structured for fast implementation, so you spend less time formatting data and more time acting on it.