It's easy to complain about the state of city streets, especially the ones you drive on, until you realize what goes into maintaining them.
The city of Cincinnati has 6,000 streets with names, 2,000 street blocks and 5,000 intersections.
Every year, Principal Engineer Chris Ertel and his staff must decide which sections of streets will get repaved. Repaving is beyond pothole repair. According to Public Works Inspector Robert Herling, "It goes all the way to the dirt, so starting from the bottom and working our way to the top."
Herling was on-site at River Road near Anderson Ferry last Monday where workers are digging out sections of crumbled roadway and pouring asphalt 12 inches thick. That project, replacing nearly four miles of River Road, won't be finished until November.
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What's taken into account
Ertel takes a very methodical approach to deciding which roads to repave. He considers the following:
- Outside funding or grants. This allows the city to double the number of lane miles.
- A neighborhood chart shows road repair cycles.
- Projects that other public and private agencies are doing, so they won't mess up a newly paved road.
- Condition of the road. There is a pavement condition index, or PCI, from 100-0. The average is 67, which is at the top of the "fair" category.
What Cincinnati streets will be repaved this year?
Here is the city's list of roads that will be repaved this year. Cincinnati typically can repair 60-120 streets a year. With grants, in fiscal year 2022 it repaved 53 lane miles. This year it will repave 58 lane miles, a half-percent of the city's network of streets.
"City Council gives up about $25 million a year for repaving roads and that's just to maintain a 67 PCI, so to try to get, say, to a 68 PCI or more to move the needle, we would need to double the funding to $50 million," Ertel says.
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Believe it or not, Cincinnati tries to make residential streets last 25-35 years and thoroughfares like Colerain or Harrison 15-20.
Ertel is always on the lookout for innovation. "The industry is ripe with new ideas on how to repair things," he says. "So we're constantly looking at plastic manhole riser rings for adjustments to keep that cost down. And we can put other things in asphalt that we don't need any place else that might not cost as much."
One thing working is joint bond. You spray it over the seams where two lanes come together and he says it rejuvenates the road.
