GRIT Provides Decision Support for Local Road Leaders
Posted: Dec 4, 2025
From road signs and culverts to pavements and roadbeds, North Dakota’s county road superintendents and engineers must make complex decisions about how to use scarce dollars to manage, maintain, and upgrade millions of dollars of transportation assets that are critical to the livelihood and quality of life of area residents. Over the last decade, the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute (UGPTI), with support from the N.D. Department of Transportation and the N.D. Legislature, has developed an online tool to help guide those decisions.
The Geographic Roadway Inventory Tool (GRIT) is an easy-to-use online system designed for roadway managers. “It helps them spend the right amount at the right time on work that makes the most sense,” said Brad Wentz, the UGPTI engineer who led GRIT’s development.
Counties using GRIT can track detailed conditions of roadways, pavement, bridges, signs, and minor structures like culverts, box culverts, and bridges under 20 feet in length. County staffers input data from their construction and maintenance records and UGPTI augments that information with its own roughness and road condition surveys. A map-based interface makes it intuitive and easy to use.
“GRIT puts all that data at their fingertips and keeps it secure in an off-site server,” noted Kelly Bengtson, a UGPTI bridge and pavement engineer. “Without it, that information, if it exists, is probably stuffed in a file cabinet or a box in the closet where you can’t find what you need when you need it.”
GRIT first came online a decade ago as a tool to collect data for UGPTI’s biennial county, township, and tribal road investment needs studies for the ND Legislature. Wentz said the tool continues to provide critical data for those studies, but researchers recognized that the tool also needed to be valuable for local road managers if they were going to be enticed to use it.
Initially, the tool focused primarily on collecting and storing key roadway information. More recently, a roadway condition index and “dashboards” were added to analyze and view data. “Those dashboards make the tool more user-friendly and can be used to automatically generate integrated maps, charts and graphs to assist in making road maintenance and improvement decisions,” Wentz said.
That ease of use makes GRIT an excellent tool for illustrating improvements and investment needs with county commissioners and the public. “With photos and data, it makes it very easy for them to sit down and look at something in detail,” said Todd Miller, Stark County Superintendent.
Stark County was an early adopter of GRIT. Miller has worked closely with Wentz, providing insight on what features and data to include to make it useful for local road managers.
Bengtson said most counties across the state are now using the tool and appreciate the improvements and new layers that allow them to track data about sign locations and conditions, , which can be key in any legal proceedings following crashes. “The first thing attorneys look at when there’s a crash is the location and conditions of signs,” Bengtson said. “With GRIT, you can document that information and call it up instantly.” A typical ND county has thousands of signs. For example, Pembina County notes on its website that it has more than 7,000 signs and one employee assigned to maintain and replace them.
Crash data from across the state are also incorporated into the system to allow road managers to track crash occurrences to identify problem areas for improvements or enforcement. That crash data coupled with sign data are useful when counties apply for Highway Safety Improvement Program funding or discretionary federal grants.
The system also allows road managers to input data on road characteristics such as construction details and specifics, pavement type and age, base thickness, shoulder width, load restrictions, maintenance practices and intervals, and other information. Each year, to augment the information provided by counties, UGPTI students drive about 3,000 miles—or about half of the state’s paved county roads (the north half of the state in even years and the south half in odd years)—using a specially instrumented vehicle to document ride quality while a 360-degree camera records a visible record of road conditions, signs, and structures. All of those pictures and data are georeferenced using GPS and loaded into GRIT to provide documentation for UGPTI’s road and bridge investment needs studies and for road superintendents and county engineers to review and use. A pavement prediction model incorporated into GRIT allows managers to estimate the lifetime and investment needs of various paved roads depending on current road conditions, traffic, and planned maintenance.
The value for local road managers comes from consistently adding and updating information from construction and maintenance projects. “We’re really encouraging those road departments to update their GRIT information with each new project,” Wentz said. “The system is only useful for them if their data are complete and up to date.”
With data entry provided by county staffers, GRIT allows them to store and track roadway information in a consistent manner over time. That consistency and accessibility facilitates multi-year planning and eases staff transitions.
"GRIT is really a win-win for UGPTI, NDDOT and local road agencies," Wentz added. "We gain access to much more up-to-date information about roads and road conditions to administer, support and research system wide efficiencies, while local managers have an improved way to access, manage, and visualize road condition and asset information across their networks."
“It’s been a great resource, especially for those counties that can’t afford a commercial system,” Miller said.
Wentz noted that the vast volume of data stored within these local and state databases will eventually be used to develop AI tools to help automate some of the roadway asset condition assessment and system optimization tasks faced by engineers and superintendents. “This isn’t a matter of reducing jobs but providing tools that help to more effectively and efficiently manage those assets while improving safety at a reduced expense for taxpayers,” he said.