Mar 13, 2008

Bay Area nation's second-worst for roads

By Erik N. Nelson / Bay Area News Group

The Bay Area has the nation's second-worst road and highway conditions, after the Los Angeles area, according to a report released Wednesday by a Washington-based transportation research group.

Poor highway conditions on 62 percent of the region's main thoroughfares cost motorists an average of $761 a year in auto maintenance, the study by The Road Information Program found.

Using federal statistical areas, the study considered the South Bay separately and found 60 percent of its roads in poor condition. The San Jose area ranks fourth-worst in the nation, after Honolulu where 62 percent of major roads and highways are in poor condition. While San Jose and its suburbs dropped from the nation's worst metropolitan area in TRIP's 2006 study, the rest of the Bay Area rose from the nation's third- to second-worst.

"We want to make motorists aware that they're essentially throwing money out the window of their cars," said Carolyn Bonifas, a research director at TRIP. "It's much cheaper to make the repairs than to pay the consequences of driving on roads that are in inadequate condition."

Californians suffer more acutely from potholes and rough patches because their state and local governments are so strapped for funds while the cost of infrastructure repair has risen precipitously, Bonifas said.

Nationwide, road repair costs have increased 44 percent over the four years ending in 2006. The study's data comes from 2006 information released at the end of last year by the Federal Highway Administration.

"It's been no secret that the gas tax that we get from state and federal sources has not been indexed (to inflation) and we're getting no more from those sources than we were in 1991," said Bill Dodd, chairman of the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

The problem of poor road quality is particularly bad in Napa County, where Dodd serves on the county's board of supervisors. All but two of the Bay Area's nine counties, Napa and Solano, help maintain their roads with a half-cent transportation sales tax. Voters in both counties rejected such a tax in 2006.

While TRIP found that poor roads across the nation cost the average urban U.S. motorist $413 a year, Bay Area motorists' auto maintenance averaged 46 percent more. Considering that Bay Area cost estimate of $761 a year from bumpy and pothole-stricken roads, the $60 per person spent annually on half-cent sales taxes seems somewhat reasonable, Dodd said.

Bay Area motorists are also likely to see some improvement thanks to something voters did approve in 2006: The $20 billion statewide Proposition 1B transportation bond. The bond measure includes $2 billion to improve local roads and $750 million to rehabilitate and improve operation of state highways and local roads.

The study did not calculate the actual cost of bringing nearly two-thirds of the Bay Area's main roads from poor quality to higher categories of mediocre, fair and good, Bonifas said, "but anecdotally, it seems to make more sense" to repair the roads rather than to keep doing expensive repairs on millions of vehicles.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission estimates that it will cost $17 billion over 25 years to get Bay Area roads in good shape and keep them that way, said commission spokesman Joe Curley. The Bay Area's share of the Proposition 1B local road money will come to about $327 million over 10 years, which Curley characterized as a "drop in the bucket."

"There's been a number of smaller cash infusions to keep us treading water," Curley said, but not nearly the amount needed to thoroughly repair the area's roads.

The MTC typically finds a wide variety of road conditions in its annual survey of road conditions in the Bay Area's cities and counties, Curley said. While the survey looks at conditions for all roads, and not just major arteries that TRIP's study did, Curley wondered at the disparity between the new study's results and other surveys.

A 2005 survey by the state transportation department, Caltrans, found that 68 percent of its highways and freeways in the Bay Area had "no distress," which was that survey's highest rating.