Dive summary:

• California, which has changed its contracting requirements for road-building to require inertial profiling to measure smoothness, has held its first certification session for equipment and operators so they do not have to travel to Texas for it.
• The inertial profiler, which operates at highway speeds to measure pavement deviation, replaces a method known nationally as the California Profilograph that required workers to walk equipment over a section of highway for measurements.
• The state Department of Transportation's new facility is along Interstate 80 in Sacramento and has tenth-mile calibration strips for concrete and for asphalt.

From the article:

In numerous national surveys, pavement smoothness is consistently ranked the most important factor by the public in how they view the transportation system....