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While I agree on your additional criteria, I feel the roughness metric itself (at least as explained here) is not as informative as it could be: a generally smooth road surface with sudden discontinuities in level (e.g.potholes) seems qualitatively worse (and damaging) than would be a smoothly-varying one with the same roughness. Perhaps an alternative metric might be based on the maximum speed at which a typical car or truck could travel without experiencing vertical accelerations above a certain threshold? ('typical', here would be with regard to things like its mass, suspension travel and stiffness, and wheelbase.)

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wubrr 6 days ago | parent [-]

The metric might already account for the scenario you bring up, since a road with potholes will be more 'rough' than a smoothly varying one based on my understanding of this metric.

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mannykannot 6 days ago | parent [-]

I thought about that, but this is what I had in mind: take a section (say 100 M) of an undulating road, smooth it out, then put a ridge across it that restores its roughness to its initial value. My feeling is that the latter would be more of a problem (this opinion is colored by the fact that, in my neighborhood, road repair is creating bumps and ridges like this.)

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wubrr 6 days ago | parent [-]

I guess it would depend on how big the ridge you add would have to be. I'm not at all an expert on this, but my thinking is that a ridge of size 2X would have an exponential effect on the travel of the suspension and resulting IRI value when compared to a ridge of size X. So a perfectly smooth road with a ridge of height 2X would have a higher IRI than the same road with 2 ridges of size X.

The wikipedia article has more details on how the measurements are done (there are multiple different ways/instruments used which can have different results) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_roughness_index

> The IRI is based on the concept of a 'golden car' whose suspension properties are known. The IRI is calculated by simulating the response of this 'golden car' to the road profile. In the simulation, the simulated vehicle speed is 80 km/h (49.7 mi/h). The properties of the 'golden car' were selected in earlier research[12] to provide high correlation with the ride response of a wide range of automobiles that might be instrumented to measure a slope statistic (m/km).

	▲	mannykannot 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for doing the research I should have done! From the passage you quote, it is clear that the IRI is already based on the response of a vehicle's suspension to the roughness of the road, even though the results are expressed as the ratio of the sum of the absolute vertical displacement to the distance traveled. The article says, about putting the results in this form, "The slope statistic of the IRI was chosen for backward compatibility with roughness measures in use."