How San Diego Plans to Assess the Condition of Nearly 2,800 Miles of City Streets
San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer speaks at a press conference last week. City of San Diego / YouTube
Mayor Kevin Faulconer wants to fix his city’s streets. But first, the city has to figure out which ones need the most immediate attention.
If you ask San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer what roadways in his city are in the worst shape, there “are a lot of worst of the worst.”
That’s what the mayor said last week at a press conference announcing a new effort to do a full condition assessment of the nearly 2,800 miles of streets in California’s second-largest city— 2,800 miles is a distance that would stretch roughly from San Diego to New York City.
“We are going to fix our streets right now,” the mayor said, noting his five-year plan to double street repairs and repave 1,000 miles of city streets.
Such an undertaking is easier said than done, but the city has a new tech tool at its disposal to help figure out which roads need the most immediate attention.
The city has a $550,000 contract with Cartegraph , a Dubuque, Iowa-based company that specializes in data collection projects, to do a full assessment of the city’s streets.
“A city-wide condition assessment of our streets helps us select and prioritize which ones should be fixed and which ones should be fixed right now,” the mayor said at the press conference. “The information that we are collecting is invaluable to the city. It’s going to help us make sure that we are spending our money wisely on the streets that need it and the streets that need immediate attention now.”
So how will the technical assessment work?
Kris McFadden, the city’s director of transportation and storm water, described how Cartegraph’s two vehicles being used for the project—a Prius and a truck—will travel the city’s streets.
The Prius, equipped with a panoramic camera, captures images of the street much like Google’s Street View vehicle, and the truck (pictured above in a screenshot from a city-produced video of last week's press conference) follows up taking “a precise measurement to create an overall condition index” of the roadway, according to McFadden.
Right now, San Diego’s roadways have an overall condition index rating of 54. McFadden said that the goal is to have a “good” condition rating of 70 in 10 years.
It will take approximately six months to collect all the data and in eight to nine months have a full assessment report of the city’s roadways.
Watch the press conference:
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