With more than 61,000 lane-km, the British Columbia side road network is an important economic asset to the province, providing access to a large resource-based economy. This network is composed of paved (25,000 lane-km) and unpaved (36,000 lane-km) sections of various geometric and construction standards and low traffic volumes. In the mid-1990s, the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation completed implementation of a comprehensive corporate pavement management application on its entire primary and secondary highway system. The ministry was also committed to extension of the system to all roads under its jurisdiction as part of its asset management practices to support formalized condition assessment and needs analysis processes. One of the obstacles facing the implementation of pavement management application on the side roads was the huge data collection cost, particularly in a time of governmentwide fiscal restraint. The side road data collection project was initiated with the objective of developing a data collection methodology and plan for the entire network by a combination of continuous and sampled approaches. The approach used to modify the existing U.S. Corps of Engineers data collection system for unpaved roads to conditions in British Columbia and the field verification trials that were completed before full-scale implementation are discussed. The data collection blueprint, which combines full and sampled coverage of the network with a road classification system, is also described. The results of the first data collection cycle and lessons learned are presented.