When Tyler Gabrielski, the town’s director of streets and transportation, opened his laptop to share a view of a map of Needham’s more than 500 streets, the screen offered a mixed bag of areas bathed in blue, light blue, green or orange.
The colorful array was displayed on a dashboard developed for the town by consultants from the BETA Group to support the Department of Public Works comprehensive pavement management program. It allows Gabrielski and his DPW colleagues to search any street to gain information on its general condition, maintenance history and other data used to help determine the town’s road repair priorities.
The dashboard is part of the data-driven approach that combines field surveys and software analysis to inform the town’s annual road maintenance program that will get underway in early June.
The data was gathered from “windshield surveys” where technicians drove the town’s roadways and visually inspected the pavement from a moving vehicle aided by sensor-based tools. The collected data was integrated into a customized application that helps the DPW identify distressed roads by a color-coding system based on a Pavement Condition Index, a numerical scale used to assess the condition of road surfaces.
In its planning, the DPW is on the lookout for swaths of orange and green, the colors that identify the streets that need either minor or major rehabilitation. Clusters of orange and green tell the team where it can get the best bang for its buck when it comes to executing its annual spring and summer maintenance program.
Broad areas that resemble the flag of Ireland rise to the top of the list for inclusion on the town’s five-year maintenance plan.
“The vast majority of our roads require either only preventative maintenance or routine maintenance, which is great,” Gabrielski said. “We have very few roads that require major rehabilitation.”
The DPW sets an annual goal to resurface 17 “lane miles” of the town’s total of 279. The work can be traditional milling and paving, microsurfacing or rubber chip seal surface treatments, as appropriate. “We build out a five-year plan and then move things up or down, depending on conditions,” said Gabrielski. “Each year, we try to group together locations so that contractors can kind of hop from one to another without having to pack everything up.”
This year’s plan comprises more than a dozen neighborhoods (see chart) where work will be assigned to contractors who were awarded general bids to provide services and material earlier this year.
The language in bid documents says the DPW will work with the contractors “to schedule 3-4 mobilizations throughout the season (approx. May- September). Each of those mobilizations will involve work at various locations throughout Town .… To maximize efficiency and convenience for the contractor the Town will attempt to group the work locations together as much as possible.”
The scheduling of those “mobilizations” is often fluid, Gabrielski explains. “We give them quantities for the different types of work that could be performed, but we don’t give them exact dates or locations.”
Some project sites will see multiple contractors performing different functions. Handicap ramps and paving, for example, are often handled by different contractors. The different resurfacing approaches require different materials and equipment.
Microsurfacing is a pavement preservation technique that creates a thin, durable surface layer. It is ideal for sealing minor cracks and extending the life of roads with minimal traffic disruption.
Rubber chip treatments involve applying a layer of hot rubberized asphalt followed by a layer of aggregate chips, which are then compacted. This method is environmentally friendly due to its use of recycled rubber and is commonly used for road maintenance and surface renewal.
“Rubber chip is most appropriate for lower volume residential streets, particularly ones that have topographical challenges because the material is flexible,” Gabrielski explained. “Microsurfacing is more appropriate for higher volume streets because it’s more durable, but it’s not as flexible.”
Managing the contractors means being flexible. “You’ll notice that the estimated schedule is pretty broad,” Gabrielski noted of the original workplan. “The weather might not cooperate with us. We could have wet pavements. Or the contractor may have a previous job in a different town run long. They may be coming to us a week late and that shifts everything.”
Funding matters
The lion’s share of the funding comes from a $5 million appropriation approved at Annual Town Meeting for public works infrastructure. Some work will be paid for out of Chapter 90 state aid for road projects.
According to information on the Town Meeting warrant, spending on street resurfacing in Fiscal 2026 is expected to be $1,775,000. Another $1,055,000 was allocated to the DPW’s sidewalk program, and $450,000 “to install new or upgrade existing curb ramps to Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards.”
“At the start of the season we come up with this nice wish list of all the possible locations that we’d like to hit in a given season,” Gabrielski said. “But I will say that it is not uncommon for locations that are towards the end of the list to end up getting pushed to the following spring.”
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