ABSTRACT
There was a period of intense bridge building in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, and aging of such infrastructure has recently become a serious social problem. Around 70% of the 700,000 bridges in Japan are managed by relatively small municipalities. Small local governments with meager financial and technical resources find it very difficult to conduct daily inspections of bridges on top of the major five-yearly periodic inspection required by government guidelines. In this research, we report on a Self-maintenance Model implemented by local residents using check sheets developed by the authors that allow citizens to perform simple inspections of bridges, an online map that visualizes the results of citizen inspections, together with the model’s effectiveness. This model is now spreading throughout Japan, not only to residents, but also to local government engineers, high school and university students studying civil engineering, and local firms as well.
