This segment is on East John St., just before Broadway.
Last week, the Mayor and Council member Tom Rasmussen added another chapter to the endless sparring over tunnel cost overruns, and the Council’s Tim Burgess announced that it was time to consider an all-out ban on plastic grocery bags. Earlier, in mid-May, the Council committed Seattle to an Arizona boycott. You wouldn’t think, with all the cost overruns debate and the getting tough on panhandlers and plastic bags and Arizona, that there was anything more pressing to be done. So I have collected five photographs I’d like them to take a look at.
I have a short bicycle ride, five to ten minutes, across Capitol Hill to my office. This morning I stopped to take photos of the larger potholes on my route. (Parts of 14th Ave. E. are all potholes, but they’re smaller in size.) My point is, these are photos of convenience; I didn’t stop if traffic was coming, or if the pothole was on the far side of the road. Any of these, if I hit them right, might send me over the handlebars into traffic.
I don’t believe the Seattle Department of Transportation is studiously ignoring Capitol Hill–everywhere I go around Seattle I see similar signs of disrepair. There is an SDOT pothole report hotline (206-684-7623, also online), but it’s like playing whack-a-mole. The repairs rarely last for long. Even repaved streets don’t seem to last for long, especially where there’s heavy bus traffic. (I’m not blaming buses–this would suggest to me that the streets aren’t being built to withstand heavy bus traffic in the first place.)
In 2006, Seattle voters passed the Bridging the Gap levy, a nine-year, $365-million transportation maintenance and improvements project specifically to catch up on deferred road maintenance. That is in addition to what is already budgeted, of course. Here is photographic evidence of just how well that’s working.
14th Ave. E. pothole
14th Ave. E. pothole
14th Ave. E. pothole
E. Denny Way rut
Besides the usual potholes there are whole streets that are need of replacement. Try taking the Seattle waterfront road south to Highway 99 and towards the 1st AVE S bridge. You almost need an off road vehicle to travse it!
Just as bad – this thing is a Beirut-worthy mess. And it’s all degrading – rapidly. Various half-assed patches applied to Furman last year are collapsing. When we had a crappy fill-job in front of our house a few years ago, I complained to the city. In a mere 18 months, it was taken care of! Bike-riding becomes more and more a matter of knowing your streets and taking appropriate advance measures.
Combined with the rampant graffiti tagging, the absolute basics of city life are collapsing around us.
In 2006 voters passed the Bridging the Gap (BTG) ballot measure, which provided new funding to address transportation needs. Yet the city is facing over $300 million in deferred arterial paving projects alone and, even with BTG, our resources are limited.
So SDOT is making the most of our scarce paving dollars. This year we will resurface or rebuild 29 lane-miles of road. We are finishing up 4th Avenue in downtown and final paving will soon take place on Airport Way S. Work has just started on S Columbian Way from Beacon Avenue S to 15th Avenue S, as well as on 22nd Avenue NE in the U District. Work on S Dearborn Street, from 5th to 10th avenues S, begins this week. By year’s end BTG will have helped pave approximately 130 lane-miles of roads. You can read more about our paving work, to include future paving locations, here: http://www.cityofseattle.net/transportation/paving.htm
Please call 684-ROAD and let us know about roadway issues you see. Our Pothole Rangers will continue to patch and repair roadway surfaces as SDOT works on longer term improvements.
Hi Rick,
Thanks for commenting. It’s funny because I called SDOT to check on this story yesterday and left a voicemail with a question and no one called back. I don’t mean to give the impression that the terrible shape of Seattle roads is SDOT’s fault, or that BTG money is being wasted. As the post title indicates, I think this problem has to do with political leadership and budgeting for realistic usage and maintenance. My question to SDOT remains, though: I assume you are tracking physical road conditions throughout the city, and I do wonder what percentage on roads (arterial and non-arterial) are in failing, average, and good condition. If that information is available online or otherwise, I’d like to see it.