San Diego is grappling with a staggering deficit of funding for road repair. A report released in January found the average street condition has gotten worse in recent years, and that without a surge in new funding, the downward trend will continue.
But a group of advocates is arguing the city's first-of-its-kind Pavement Management Plan fails to ask two key questions. First: Does San Diego simply have too much pavement?
All together, the city has about 17,300 acres of paved streets to maintain. And many of those streets are excessively wide. For example, North Avenue in University Heights is about 67 feet from one curb to the other. That's wide enough for six lanes of travel, far more space than is needed for a quiet neighborhood street with a speed limit of 25 miles per hour.
Two blocks east, Georgia Street is only about 42 feet wide. Not only does that street have less pavement — it also has a wider strip of landscaping between the sidewalk and curb.
Chloe Lauer, executive director of the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition, said the city should consider strategically reducing the width of its streets, either by removing unnecessary lanes or making the existing lanes narrower, and replacing the excess pavement with exposed earth.
A study last year from Johns Hopkins University found narrower lanes also discourage speeding and reduce crashes.
"It would be a perfect opportunity to reduce the amount of asphalt that the city needs to maintain in the long term, and at the same time you could extend the planted area, providing more shade, more greenery, more beauty, and then also decreasing the stormwater runoff that comes from having all of these impermeable surfaces," Lauer said.
The second question Lauer said the Pavement Management Plan fails to ask: How much money can the city save on road maintenance by shifting travel behavior away from cars and toward biking, walking and public transit?
"As our cars and vehicles get bigger and heavier, and with electric cars being very heavy with their batteries, that puts more stress on the roads, which requires more resurfacing at a faster rate," Lauer said. "So basically if we continue in this direction, we'll never catch up."
Cyclists and pedestrians, on the other hand, put a negligible amount of stress on streets. Bus lanes and light rail can also be less expensive to maintain than streets because public transit can move more people in fewer vehicles.
In short, fewer cars on the road means pavement repair jobs will last longer.
The city has already committed to significantly reducing car travel in its Climate Action Plan. But Lauer said it hasn't attempted to calculate the cost savings on road maintenance that would come from achieving those goals.
The city's Pavement Management Plan has been criticized from multiple angles. Residents of Southeast San Diego have said it prioritizes cheaper maintenance of streets that are in decent shape while failing to plan for the more expensive repairs needed in their neighborhoods — an inequity they say is rooted in the racist housing and infrastructure policies of prior decades.
Those equity concerns were echoed in a report released Wednesday by the Independent Budget Analyst, which said the city needs to come up with a plan to finance the more expensive work of repairing failed roads.
The Office of the City Auditor also released a critique of the city's road maintenance policies in February. Included in the auditor's recommendations is a call to more consistently evaluate street conditions so the city doesn't waste money repaving streets that are holding up just fine.
City spokesman Ramon Galindo told KPBS in a statement that the Pavement Management Plan was not intended to analyze changes in infrastructure.
"The Pavement Management Plan forecasted the cost to maintain existing paving infrastructure, not other mobility improvements," Galindo said. "Other documents, such as the Mobility Master Plan and the Climate Action Plan, are the planning documents for mobility projects and climate action."
Lauer said the Pavement Management Plan reflects how the city too often approaches transportation and climate policy in silos. But despite her qualms with the plan, Lauer said she appreciates the efforts to think strategically about road maintenance.
"We definitely thank the Transportation Department and the mayor for asking for this assessment," Lauer said. "Without that, we wouldn't have anything to respond to."
