Roads get all the attention. And understandably so — a failed road is visible, it generates complaints, and it costs a lot to fix. But the right-of-way between your roads contains a lot of other assets that also need to be tracked, inspected, and replaced on a schedule. Most small towns aren't managing any of it systematically.
That changes when you start treating your infrastructure like what it actually is: a portfolio of assets with lifespans, replacement costs, and inspection schedules.
What Lives in Your Right-of-Way
The right-of-way isn't just pavement. It's everything maintained by the town in the public corridor:
Each one of these has a service life, a replacement cost, and a liability exposure if it fails. A guardrail in poor condition. A catch basin that's collapsing. A culvert that hasn't been inspected in fifteen years. These are risks sitting in your right-of-way that most small towns have no record of.
Why Service Life Tracking Matters
When you know when an asset was installed and what its expected service life is, you can plan replacements proactively instead of reacting to failures. A stop sign installed in 2010 with a 12-year sheeting life should have been replaced in 2022. If it hasn't been, it's a liability and a safety issue. If you don't have a record of when it was installed, you have no way of knowing.
Reactive replacement — waiting for an asset to fail before replacing it — almost always costs more than planned replacement. Emergency mobilization, disruption to traffic, and the liability exposure from the failure itself all add up.
Where to Start
Don't try to inventory everything at once. Pick the highest-risk asset type for your town and start there. For most small municipalities that's signs — because of the MUTCD compliance requirement and the liability exposure from faded retroreflectivity. Get your sign inventory built first, then move to guardrails, then catch basins.
When your crew is out inspecting roads, have them add assets as they go. A catch basin at the corner of Main and Oak takes thirty seconds to log — tap Add Asset, GPS fills in the location, snap a photo, done. Over a season you'll have an inventory that would have taken weeks to build any other way.
The Long Game
Asset management isn't glamorous. But over time, a complete inventory of your right-of-way assets — with inspection records, photos, and replacement schedules — becomes one of the most valuable things your department has. It protects the town from liability. It helps justify budget requests. And when a new DPW director comes in, they inherit a record instead of starting from scratch.
18 asset types. All in one platform.
PaveRank tracks all your right-of-way assets alongside your road network — GPS located, photo documented, and scheduled for replacement automatically.
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