Roads worse than San Jose? Look to the south.



San Diego's roads are crumbling.
The city has the money to fix potholes
 but hasn't proven it can efficiently spend it.
 Photo: Sam Hodgson

 In a continuing look at San Jose's road conditions along with other Bay Area cities I have highlighted the need for urgency in our own city and around the Bay Area. Now, with the wonderful work of  the Voice of San Diego we have a look at just how bad their problems are in comparison with San Jose's.

San Jose's Director of Transportation has been up front with city residents when he says that it will take $100 million each year just to maintain local roadways. In fact road repair funds are lacking so much that the director has had to outline a program of maintenance triage with the moniker "Priority Street Network". In essence only key arterial roadways, bus routes and commercial districts will be maintained.

In San Diego the situation is much worse; not only in the condition of their roadways but the cost to fix the road network. According to Carl DeMaio, a San Diego City mayoral candidate, "San Diego already has the eighth worst roads in the country and under the current plan at City Hall the roads will get worse" (
San Diego's Road Problem Fact Check).

At a San Diego City Council committee hearing in February it was revealed that San Diego's road repair problems have reached breathtaking new depths according to engineering officials. According to the Voice of San Diego, "simply maintaining the status quo would cost $160 million a year. That's more than the annual budgets of the parks and rec, library and environmental services departments combined. The city's plan to borrow $500 million won't provide enough money to reverse the decay or even preserve the status quo. Under its current proposal, the city won't begin making progress until 2017." (Streets will worsen for the next 5 years, report says)

These are difficult times, with housing still searching for new lows (US Housing Rebound Could Take An Entire Generation: Shiller), gas prices continuing to climb, and the astronomical amounts needed just to maintain our local roadways (gas taxes, state and federal highways are another matter). But here, as well as in other U.S. cities, we continue to satisfy increase road demand with new, expensive projects with no thought as to their expected return on investment or future required maintenance costs.

As I've mentioned before in this blog, we seem to have a knee jerk reaction to the increase in road capacity followed by immediate approvals to build even more auto centric retail developments (City to proceed with 45 acre" Mega Mall" on Almaden Expressway), that put even more pressure on our roadways in a vicious circle of big box retail expansion, roadway expansion, big box retail expansion, etc.

What are your thoughts?

San Diego's Road Problem Fact Check

How the Mayoral Candidates want to fix the roads.

Streets will worsen for the next 5 years, report says.

Roads Officially worse under Sanders, report says