SAN DIEGO — The City of San Diego is spending half a million dollars to assess road conditions across the city’s 2,800 centerline miles.
It’s a massive project made bigger with the record high rainfall totals the region has had this winter.
“Certainly, the more rain that we get and the longer amounts of rain we get, the longer the storms, it causes the problem to be even more significant in San Diego,” Bethany Bezak, director of the City’s Department Of Transportation, told FOX 5.
The city has hired an outside agency to conduct assessment the condition of every road in San Diego.
“There’s a van that’s going across the city in multiple locations for the next several months,” Bezak said.
The company doing the survey is called Fugro. Their van is equipped with lasers and other tools that measure the pavement’s smoothness and depth of potholes. It’s already assessing the city’s 2,800 miles of streets. The project started last month and will continue through the end of summer.
“It’s allowing us to be able to plan out infrastructure repairs and pavement repairs, long-term,” Bezak said.
Teams are working simultaneously to repair the roads as fast as they can, but with all the rain over the last few months, they’ve lost more than 70 work days.
“So with those longstanding periods of rain, it’s causing us to minimize the number of days of work that we have in the field, and so not only is rain causing more potholes to be created, it’s another day in the field that we’re not able to fill the current potholes that we have,” Bezak said.
The automatic road analyzer will measure and then rate the roads as good, fair or poor, which will allow officials to decide between minor repairs like slurry seal, which is a cost-effective surface treatment versus major repairs like complete surface reconstruction.
“It allows us to make decisions based on the condition of the data, where we put the funding so that’s when we start to take a look at things like equity and the locations where we need to do the most improvements,” Bezak said.
