Local Street & Road Conditions
Every trip we take begins or ends on a local street. Regular maintenance is required to keep the Bay Area’s valuable roadways working well.
Local streets and roads provide access to jobs, homes, schools, shopping, medical care and recreation. Though everybody uses roads, the condition of pavement on the Bay Area’s local streets and roads is “fair” at best.
On MTC’s index, the Bay Area scores a 67 out of a possible 100 points for pavement conditions. A score of 60 or below marks a need for major rehabilitation.
MTC has long advocated for pavement preservation, and has set targets to achieve an average regionwide score of 85 or higher.
MTC helps Bay Area jurisdictions analyze pavement conditions, so they can make decisions about how to spend dollars on improvements.
A city or county that spends $1 on timely maintenance to keep a section of roadway in good condition would have to spend $5 to restore the same road if the pavement is allowed to deteriorate to a PCI score below 60.
Heavy vehicles such as trucks and buses but a real strain on the pavement.
A bus exerts more than 7,000 times the stress than a typical SUV does, while a garbage truck exerts more than 9,000 times as much. Not surprisingly, cracks appear more quickly on streets with large traffic volumes and/or heavy use by trucks and buses.
The local streets and roads owned and maintained by the Bay Area’s nine counties and 101 cities include nearly 43,000 lane-miles of pavement.
Add curbs and gutters, sidewalks, storm drains, traffic signs, signals and lights needed for functioning roadways — that’s a big network.
To replace this network would cost something on the order of $40 billion or more. Keeping the system in good working order saves everybody money.