Why So Many Potholes? Our City Streets are Failing

Pothole déjà vu, from 2008

It's that time of year; the weather is wintry, night comes early.

And although I pride myself on tootling around town year-round on my bike, I start leaving it at home because the streets have all grown potholes of sizes that make riding dangerous.

At night, they're hard to spot, full of rainwater, and I'm usually busy watching out for cars that don't see me, so there's just that unpleasant second as the front wheel drops and then a wrist-breaking impact that sends me half over the handlebars.  

I see car drivers grimace, too, as their rims transmit the shock. Some of these potholes feel like they're going to take your axle with them. Seattle neighborhoods have come to feel like proving grounds for SUV manufacturers.

On the one hand, potholes are a fact of Seattle's brand of winter weather: studded tires, chains, and snow plows damage the road surface, and heavy rains invade any cracks and crevices to lift asphalt away from the road's subsurface, so that chunks eventually just pop free. (All year, heavy bus and truck traffic creates ridges and ruts in roads not rated to carry them.)

To deal with this fact of life, the city has deputized Pothole Rangers to tackle quick fixes; you can report potholes online (or call 684-ROAD) and they should be filled within three business days. 

But on the other hand, the sheer number of potholes are also a fact of budget. (To deal with the Seattle Department of Transportation's deficit of almost $8 million, one 5-person crew was eliminated, and an extra day was added to the expected wait, from 48 to 72 hours. We're told the new patches will last longer, and I certainly believe that SDOT will act as if they are lasting 12 months.) Besides the backlog dealing with hundreds of new potholes, SDOT has a chronic backlog of failing streets it needs to fix. 

But with a deficit of some 14 percent of its annual allocation from the city's General Fund, even after the Bridging the Gap levy, SDOT is underfunded and underpowered when it comes to keeping up with street wear and tear. There are hundreds of miles of arterial streets slated for repair. That doesn't include the residential streets, which I think probably represent, in miles, an order of magnitude greater backlog.

"[E]stimates show that 25 percent of roads in cities across the United States must be either rehabilitated or completely replaced in the next two years," reported PublicWorks in 2006. What do you think, did we get there? In 2009, almost $40 million was allocated for arterial asphalt; in an austere 2010, that fell by almost half, to $23 million. 

There are two great truths to having better roads: One is that the better they're built, the longer they will last. There is a great concrete vs. asphalt debate on that subject, but it's also true that a road's subsurface construction plays a huge role in how well it handles water. Second, but no less important really, is that you have to pay for maintenance instead of spending the bulk of your transportation budget on new road projects. 

In Seattle, we can look around at our collapsing road infrastructure while we spend $50 million on the East Phase of the Mercer Street project. That bid came in 23 percent below estimates. Just for the record: $50 million for a single phase of a new project (totaling about $300 million), as compared to $23 million allocated for existing arterial asphalting. You can debate the merits of the project--they don't call Mercer a mess for nothing--but what is clear is that embarking on new projects seriously compromises the city's ability to maintain the roads we've already got.

SDOT, which has been under stress for years, has already effectively triaged road maintenance and decided to focus everything on keeping arterials passable. As one Crosscut commmenter noted on Jordan Royer's post about SDOT funding, "Repaving and maintenance on side streets was abandoned long ago." Meanwhile, we keep digging our pothole deeper. Because we can't keep up with streets aging out of safe usefulness, the problem gets worse and worse.

To date, the response has been, as with Bridging the Gap, to try throwing extra money at it. It turns out that's not enough--whether because it's spent too widely on band-aid fixes, or because a ceaseless road-building and -widening strategy is ultimately unsustainable, I can't tell--but I can tell you that you can't build a road out of pothole patches.