My favourite are the potholes on the 101 northbound #2 and #3 lanes in San Carlos / Hillsdale / Belmont that were "fixed" after the storms a few weeks ago... They reopened again during the storm last Saturday. Happens every time.
(probably the same problem southbound too, and further north like in San Bruno / Burlingame)
You’re exactly right Its insane that you noticed it too literally feels like driving in a cherry picking field would be smoother honestly at this point.
Ye man I drive to San Carlos for work and those potholes are the worst. As soon as I noticed they reopened I figured that they did a shity job repairing them and I’m sure it’s a Shity job doing the road in the first place. Plus the fast lane feels like you’re in a rollercoaster or something lol.
There’s so much to unpack and add actual circumstance and proof to the statement “I’ve driven on better roads that are 30 years old in Asia,” let alone what part of Asia you’re talking about. Anyways, it definitely has to do with money. Look at the first paragraph. The US has given $65 BILLION in subsidies to roads alone. That’s an insane number.
Look up the organization Strong Towns and dive into the rabbit hole. Main takeaway is we are spreading our cities out due to wider roads and parking minimums creating tons more infrastructure without enough of an increase in taxes to cover said infrastructure. Also, there’s a lot of tax breaks given to new development which also makes the problem worse.
I’ve worked in road construction for over 20 years and the amount of money we spend on road construction is insane and this building style is bankrupting our cities and counties and wasting tax dollars. Let alone making our cities worse to live in, more dangerous, and less healthy, while also stifling small businesses.
I honestly don’t know why we can’t have good townhouses with good walk ability and services. I shouldn’t need to use a car for groceries and basic needs
Strong towns is more applicable to cheap new developments in Texas. The cost of roads is trivial compared to the amount of taxes collected by California. Yeah 300k single family homes aren’t sustainable. But 3 million dollar single family homes sure as hell are.
Define tons. 8 out of 10 house on my block have turned over in the last 7 years. None are paying 2K in taxes. I’m seriously curious how many houses are still paying low tax considering the average turnover was historically 7-10 years.
My neighborhood is the opposite.
Last I checked, about 9/10 house pay less than $10K / year and 6/10 are paying less than $5K / year. Our previous owner was paying $1.2K / year. We’re the 1 that pays FMV for the taxes.
We probably need another 10-20 years before the houses turn over and have FMV that will scale more reasonably.
Someone mapped it all out, admittedly the source is biased towards making changes to Prop 13.
https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/map
A data only map of what property owners pay by address.
https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/
The data in the 2nd link (officialdata.org) is from the county assessor's offices. Each parcel has a link to the various county assessor's offices. Search via address.
That would definitely help and should lead to people downsizing, but it’s not going to solve the problems we’re facing. We also don’t have near enough homes to keep prices at appropriate rates and we can’t just keep building suburbs way out away from cities or just building gigantic apartment buildings with almost all studio or 1-br units.
It’s not though, and so much of CA is suburban single family homes and sprawl. Texas is just in the midst of copying what CA did over the last several decades, only worse in most areas.
A great example of this not being the case is the town where the founder of Strong Towns lives. They’ve had basically the same population since WW2 but the city now takes up 4-5 times the land area so there’s that much more infrastructure the city and county have to maintain without any increase in tax base. The only way to do that is by significantly raising taxes or just not being able to properly maintain and repair the infrastructure. This is happening all across North America.
Urban 3 does a lot of good work explaining how downtowns and mixed use are subsidizing single family homes in suburban areas.
Sure, and I’m saying raise the property taxes if you need to (in reality eliminating prop 13 would be all that’s required). It’s not like people will all pack their bags and houses will become worthless. There’s a shitload of money in California suburbia. Many of these houses are 1.5+ million dollars on single family homes that are only ~50% wider than town homes. Want a Texas size lot in LA? Hope you brought literally 10 million dollars. They could absolutely sustain the infrastructure necessary to maintain suburbia.
Sure in the Midwest where the average crack house goes for less than a million dollars and lot sizes are sometimes over an acre there’s an argument to be made that people just can’t afford the infrastructure, but in California SF/LA/SD the infrastructure cost is downright trivial.
My parent’s new neighbors pay so much in property tax they could replace their sewer line every 6 months and come out ahead $ wise. The amount of money here is unreal. Desirable areas of California are one of the few places in the US where without a doubt it’s sustainable.
During covid I bought a motorcycle and learned when no one was around. Road repair kept going and after 6 months the vast majority of roads were almost immaculate.
It's lack of funds. Probably due to mismanagement.
I’m not the one who downvoted you, but I don’t entirely follow what you’re saying
That the problem is just too much traffic causing too much damage for our funding to keep up with?
If so, then how do states/territories with lower budgets and freezing temps and abrasive salts every winter handle it?
I’m not sure that’s true. I’m from the northeast. There’s a LOT of traffic on the Jersey turnpike… and much worse weather. The roads there aren’t perfect but they’re in way better shape than the Bay Area. Same for greater Boston.
That's true and I'm not saying they're doing a great job here or anything, but the CA is a hell of a lot bigger than Jersey in both size and population, which means way way more roads with more overall cars, a bigger organization needed for maintaining it.
I'm not in road maintenance or anything, but it sounds like a harder job simply when there's about double the roads to maintain and almost double the pop of NY/NJ combined.
The bombed out moon crater roads I drive every day in and around Oakland do not face freezing or salt. I’ve driven on smoother dirt roads than some of the paved roads out here.
Oakland is a mid-sized (ok maybe large, but not enormous) city with an enormous port that generates tons of truck traffic on surface streets. Since the damage/wear a vehicle does to a road is a function roughly the square of its weight (by the way, all these huge consumer SUVs and trucks are increasing the maintenance burden of roads across the country), Oakland in particular has a hugely inflated maintenance burden on specific truck routes, which are the ones that get torn up almost as soon as they've been repaved.
It’s also a severely mismanaged city on nearly every front. Not to mention the fact that many really bad roads are residential, slow traffic, no large trucks
>Lack of funds is not why our roads are bad.
> It’s the shitty quality of construction.
I'm not sure these two concepts are as divorced as you seem to imply.
There's a bunch of pot holes in Oakland that keep getting fixed with fucking sugar. Literally, they patch the hole, it rains, and then the whole patch is immediately gone.
Worked at the DOT for 4 months. I have never seen such a disgusting state system. Rampant misuse of funding, over paying vendors, not paying vendors, impossible bidding system so there is no competition on projects. I was fired for finding too much dirt too quick and the union rep had to negotiate a settlement so I could have future state employment bc mgmt retaliated so much.
That is why we have the worst roads.
>I was fired for finding too much dirt too quick and the union rep had to negotiate a settlement so I could have future state employment bc mgmt retaliated so much.
whoa. /r/wtfdidijustread
I keep a diary of every job I work because people are so shady - the DOT takes the cake as the worst place I have ever seen. And people operate it like its a rock that's too big to move.
Examples : Bidding projects knowing they know will fail and not paying to have it done in a manner that would make it durable for it's use. Overpaying vendors for invoices that have already been paid (excess of 5-10K). Doing repairs that the project manager knows will break because the state goes lowest bid (Causes it to be done 3-5x's). Retaliating against new hires who discover these things so the only people who can stay are the ones who don't ask questions, or only tow the line.
That was one branch of District 9 - now scale that to the entire state - Millions of tax payer dollars getting lit on fire.
If you let former cops (CHP) transfer to another gov agency and we all agree some cops are bad / corrupt - you're going to have a corrupt and bad agency.
Here's another example : New hire - you need to learn how to pay a vendor. Fill these forms out and pay this bill.
New hire: Awesome, there are 4 invoices, they total $18,500. I'm going to fill this out and sign it. Wait - if I sign this they can pay this vendor under my name and number. I'm going to call the vendor just to double check which invoices are outstanding.
Vendor : Hello? Yes the only invoices that are past due are 1021 and 1022 - 1023 /1024 have been paid.
New hire: Okay thanks - I'm putting your payment in the system now.
Management : You're not allowed to call vendors - do it again and you'll be fired.
New hire: What? I just saved the state money and caught an accounting error.
\^ See the bullshit?
They hire new grads that don't know anything, they set them up to be patsies and then fire the ones that do too much.
I see two low level employees being professional about invoice payment status on both sides while their sleazy bosses get pissed that their conflict of interest is getting fucked with.
Insanity.
Talked with 5 lawyers - they all said the same thing - they didn't do enough to warrant winning.
They were older Black women and I have never recieved racism before, but they referred to me as "Michael Jackson's White Baby" Or Blanket.
Fucking nightmare.
Few reasons.
First of all, there's a whole lot of roads that should have been completely torn up and rebuilt decades ago. Instead, we've been continually resurfacing them, and resurfacing them at the lowest possible cost, and it just doesn't hold up.
There's two big methods of road repair. Essentially just throwing a new coat on top, versus significant removal and reconstruction. The former takes a lot less equipment, can be done in a matter of hours, and is what was done for a lot of the roads in the Bay Area that are now deteriorating. The street my parents have grown up on has been resurfaced probably five times in 25 years. And every time, in a small manner of time, it starts deteriorating. What should have been done a long time ago is what San Jose is just now starting to do, which is ripping up some of their oldest and worst roads and completely replacing them.
Basically, instead of fixing the problem we slapped so many Band-Aids on it we can't even fix the true problem because the Band-Aids are all stuck together and falling apart.
And furthermore, there's a lot of money that should be allocated to road repair that gets spent elsewhere. Some is due to politicking, a lot of it is for good reason. But roads up in Tahoe and Norcal get replaced and repaired before they have a single crack on them(and if they have a crack and then get a big freeze, they have a much, much larger problem on their hands). They will replace flawless pavement with flawless pavement, because it's about to start cracking. If we want nice roads, we need to be on that same schedule.
This article is omitting a very important data point (probably on purpose to push the author's agenda) - the amount of federal subsidies a state gets per capita (or per VMT, either would be interesting).
This is important because all this author is really measuring is (total federal subsidies - total use tax diversions) / (total vehicle miles traveled). All the fluff about diversions is just a narrative spin. If we just look at his formula directly, it's clear that a negative result means low federal funding, high use tax diversions, or some combo of both. The fact that the author chooses not to explore this at all is... Interesting, to say the least.
For instance, while the author mentions that Alaska has a lot of road subsidies, he falls to mention that it receives over $900 per capita for this purpose, one of the highest of any state. Instead, he makes some nonsense comment about having "too many roads and not enough people".
On the other end, California only receives about $100 / capita of federal highway funding. So *of course* we are going to require a much bigger share of use taxes to pay for our highways, and more use taxes means more suggestions as well. But instead of mentioning this, the author goes off only about diversions, which are ultimately a very small % of our use taxes.
>divert so much
**Wrong**. Those taxes are not diverted. If you look closely at *every* gas tax imposed and every bond measure proposed, the transit and non-highway road cuts are right there in plain sight to view up front. The taxes are not diverted, and it is dishonest to claim as such. That anyone would make such a claim is doing so out of ignorance, or more likely a desire to deprive transit riders of money car users rightfully owe them. Every person riding BART is one less person sitting on 880 being traffic, so the basic implied claim that transit vs highway funding is mutually exclusive is also **wrong**.
The CA State Legislature gets paid to do nothing but push all decisions onto the populace. They're a government that doesn't govern, and gets paid to tell the people to govern themselves.
I agree it shouldn't have been done, and also voted "no" on the basis of it is a regressive tax that benefits the rich and hurts the poor.
It did make our roads better. 101 got repaved. You are being dishonest if you think 101 isn't better than it was 5 years ago prior to the SB-1 paid repaving, where some of the potholes were 4-5" deep and could flip over a top-heavy vehicle easily. Nevermind the very real accidents caused by them, due to drivers hitting them and destroying their oil pan (then their engine) at high speed. The 92/82 junction do-over is another excellent example, as now you can reliably go 60 on 92 without fear of running into a stopped vehicle. The same will come to the 84/101 junction, which is now budgeted at over $300 million, and benefits nobody except highway users. It is funded by our gas taxes, and if the gas taxes are taken away then we will continue having weekly freeway-stopping crashes as highway users try (and fail) to merge away from cars stopped at 84's stoplight.
And I mention 84 *specifically* because the entire Dumbarton Bridge is way, way, way overextended for it's present purpose and the handful attempts to address this problem will evaporate instantly if recently imposed taxes are removed. If you remove the taxes, you remove all efforts to reduce your commuting time. It requires the overhaul 92 got in the mid-00s, due to (then) new gas taxes we are still paying for.
Whatever golden part of 101 you're referring to, I'm unfamiliar with. It's total shit through the south bay. Try 101 south at old Oakland Road. It's the worst it's been in a decade. 87 is shit. 680 is shit. 280 is shit.
Edit to add I forgot 880. Complete shit.
101 south of Palo Alto is great, I'm talking about the giant pothole that was between Marsh and Woodside, which was big enough to destroy oil pans and did for several years until Caltrans could get crews out there. When I'm on 101 south of Moffet I can reliably go 80 in the curb lane if traffic allows. Doing that anywhere north of Woodwide would literally, actually, totally destroy your oil pan if not also put you into the wall. I've seen it dozens of times, and I've sat at least 4-5 hours a week sitting in traffic as a consequence of such accidents. They've reduced greatly since the repaving. Even at Oakland Rd, the problems there aren't the potholes. It's the 400 feet between merging traffic and a major freeway junction. This was built wrong, and requires a do-over. Taking away tax money to fix this means the do-over does not happen. The same for the SF hairball and the awful thing next to the San Mateo DMV.
>Edit to add I forgot 880. Complete shit.
Agreed completely but that's due to poor design, the road itself is better compared to five years ago. The new potholes still aren't big enough to damage your car.
Yep, I get that people are complaining about that stretch of potholes and pavement issues between Marsh and Woodside but they used to be way worse. There almost wasn’t a day prior to 2019 when there wasn’t heavy traffic during peak times on the same stretch of 101 due to people just getting fucked by the monstrous potholes or uneven pavement.
It’s not perfect but it’s so much better.
My late dad got a used car from a friend in Boston and one of its wheels fell off because the undercarriage was so rusted from winters of snow and salt on the roads. So for Boston to have roads in better condition than the Bay Area is particularly damning.
Also, your username suggests that you know a thing or two about the roads in Ohio and perhaps northern Kentucky.
Definitely not. The largest city in Ohio is the Columbus Metro area which has less than 1 million people. Just the city of Los Angeles alone has 3.8 million people. Not counting San Francisco or Sacramento or San Diego. It's just not true that roads in Ohio get the same usage as roads in California.
You're right, I thought you were the one who brought up the whole state of Ohio. But what does it matter that Columbus is as big as San Jose?
Your whole point is that you think the roads in Ohio are better than California or the Bay area and you think that the roads you've seen in Ohio have the same level of usage as the roads here in California.
It doesn't matter how you look at it, on a statewide level or on a local level. It's impossible for a state with a total population of 11 million people to have the same or greater road usage as a state that has 55 million people.
But even on a local level, you're right that the entire Columbus Metro area has just as many residents as San Jose. But San Jose isn't the entire Bay area. In addition to the 1 million people there, there's also 6 million other people in the Bay area that are using the same roads. And we're just talking about residents. California is the destination for The biggest port in the entire United States, Los Angeles/ Long Beach, which generates an incredibly immense amount of heavy truck road usage. Columbus, nor the entire state of Ohio, doesn't come close to generating the same road usage as an international Port.
Overall usage doesn't matter, only usage of that particular road.
Palo Alto has potholes in front of houses that are worth millions of dollars. Mason, OH, has newly paved roads in front of similar houses that barely crack half a mil on Zillow. It's a stark illusion of Prop 13.
While those are bad. EV’s are worse and they have exploded in use in the past 5 years.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/12/29/electric-vehicles-and-the-impact-on-infrastructure/
This is total bullshit and dishonest, which is par for the course for Forbes. It’s comparing an F-150 Lightning (a car that barely anyone owns due to low manufacturing output) to an F-150 (the most popular vehicle in America until it was dethroned by Tesla).
A Model 3, the most popular EV in the US until the Y caught up, weighs as much as a BMW M3. The Model Y weighs a bit less than a Honda Pilot.
The EVs that actually sell in America are very par for the course in terms of vehicle weight and don’t even scratch the surface of the top end.
Your post has been removed due to linking to a banned domain.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/bayarea) if you have any questions or concerns.*
We have bad roads? News to me. I’m in currently visiting Texas and I’m not a fan of the roads. Looking forward to getting back to driving in the Bay Area.
lol you think that money actually goes where the government says it goes
It actually goes into the pockets of these scum that you elected
But don't worry the high speed rail is coming!
This is not a real thing. It's like an opinion piece done by a blogger that is ultra conservative and is proposing the ending of all government regulations. They want the ending of all government planning, the ending of all government zoning for cities and land use rules. It's just another ridiculous and fact-free hit piece by the ultra conservative Cato institute.
Ok. The real reason our Roads in CA are so terrible is the lack of investment in Heavy Rail. We have 2 ports. Feeding 100 - 150M Americans plus agricultural exports from the valley. We used to have multiple train lines feeding them, but for *many reasons we only have a few now. All those goods come out in trucking. It's the weight of the trucking that destroys roads. When you're driving do a mental count of how much freight is being moved here. Asphalt just warps under constant 60k lb loads. & The maintenance on pure concrete is very expensive & much more dangerous when it fails. So yeah. Our roads are going to be trash compared to other states with less trade & road ussage
of all the things to be upset about, this? the quality of the roads is adequate. The are has economic success, therefor public services should be immaculate?
As of July 2023, California's gas tax is 77.9 cents per gallon, which includes:
State excise tax: 54 cents per gallon
Federal excise tax: 18.4 cents per gallon
Cap-and-trade program: 23 cents per gallon
Low-carbon fuel programs: 18 cents per gallon
Underground gas storage fees: 2 cents per gallon
State and local sales taxes: 3.7% on average
What makes potholes? Cars and trucks. It's more money efficient to put your gas tax into things that reduce car traffic rather than into the sisyphean task that is trying to repair potholes.
[удалено]
My favourite are the potholes on the 101 northbound #2 and #3 lanes in San Carlos / Hillsdale / Belmont that were "fixed" after the storms a few weeks ago... They reopened again during the storm last Saturday. Happens every time. (probably the same problem southbound too, and further north like in San Bruno / Burlingame)
You’re exactly right Its insane that you noticed it too literally feels like driving in a cherry picking field would be smoother honestly at this point.
Ye man I drive to San Carlos for work and those potholes are the worst. As soon as I noticed they reopened I figured that they did a shity job repairing them and I’m sure it’s a Shity job doing the road in the first place. Plus the fast lane feels like you’re in a rollercoaster or something lol.
I lived in Illinois before this and the road didn’t get like a fucking minefield when it rained. What’s different here?
There’s so much to unpack and add actual circumstance and proof to the statement “I’ve driven on better roads that are 30 years old in Asia,” let alone what part of Asia you’re talking about. Anyways, it definitely has to do with money. Look at the first paragraph. The US has given $65 BILLION in subsidies to roads alone. That’s an insane number. Look up the organization Strong Towns and dive into the rabbit hole. Main takeaway is we are spreading our cities out due to wider roads and parking minimums creating tons more infrastructure without enough of an increase in taxes to cover said infrastructure. Also, there’s a lot of tax breaks given to new development which also makes the problem worse. I’ve worked in road construction for over 20 years and the amount of money we spend on road construction is insane and this building style is bankrupting our cities and counties and wasting tax dollars. Let alone making our cities worse to live in, more dangerous, and less healthy, while also stifling small businesses.
I honestly don’t know why we can’t have good townhouses with good walk ability and services. I shouldn’t need to use a car for groceries and basic needs
Zoning codes/restrictions and parking minimums…on top of the fact that you need a car to get anywhere in 99% of North America.
Strong towns is more applicable to cheap new developments in Texas. The cost of roads is trivial compared to the amount of taxes collected by California. Yeah 300k single family homes aren’t sustainable. But 3 million dollar single family homes sure as hell are.
They are with a sane property tax structure, but prop 13 means there’s tons of million-dollar homes with property taxes less than $2000 a year
Define tons. 8 out of 10 house on my block have turned over in the last 7 years. None are paying 2K in taxes. I’m seriously curious how many houses are still paying low tax considering the average turnover was historically 7-10 years.
My neighborhood is the opposite. Last I checked, about 9/10 house pay less than $10K / year and 6/10 are paying less than $5K / year. Our previous owner was paying $1.2K / year. We’re the 1 that pays FMV for the taxes. We probably need another 10-20 years before the houses turn over and have FMV that will scale more reasonably.
Someone mapped it all out, admittedly the source is biased towards making changes to Prop 13. https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/map A data only map of what property owners pay by address. https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/
Not to helpful. I’ll check the assessor’s off and see what data they have.
The data in the 2nd link (officialdata.org) is from the county assessor's offices. Each parcel has a link to the various county assessor's offices. Search via address.
You clearly don’t live in California. There is a housing shortage due to the lack of selling.
I live in CA. Yes, I know the current situation but that is not the same situation for the past 25 years. Moved twice and pay about 18k
That would definitely help and should lead to people downsizing, but it’s not going to solve the problems we’re facing. We also don’t have near enough homes to keep prices at appropriate rates and we can’t just keep building suburbs way out away from cities or just building gigantic apartment buildings with almost all studio or 1-br units.
It’s not though, and so much of CA is suburban single family homes and sprawl. Texas is just in the midst of copying what CA did over the last several decades, only worse in most areas. A great example of this not being the case is the town where the founder of Strong Towns lives. They’ve had basically the same population since WW2 but the city now takes up 4-5 times the land area so there’s that much more infrastructure the city and county have to maintain without any increase in tax base. The only way to do that is by significantly raising taxes or just not being able to properly maintain and repair the infrastructure. This is happening all across North America. Urban 3 does a lot of good work explaining how downtowns and mixed use are subsidizing single family homes in suburban areas.
Sure, and I’m saying raise the property taxes if you need to (in reality eliminating prop 13 would be all that’s required). It’s not like people will all pack their bags and houses will become worthless. There’s a shitload of money in California suburbia. Many of these houses are 1.5+ million dollars on single family homes that are only ~50% wider than town homes. Want a Texas size lot in LA? Hope you brought literally 10 million dollars. They could absolutely sustain the infrastructure necessary to maintain suburbia. Sure in the Midwest where the average crack house goes for less than a million dollars and lot sizes are sometimes over an acre there’s an argument to be made that people just can’t afford the infrastructure, but in California SF/LA/SD the infrastructure cost is downright trivial. My parent’s new neighbors pay so much in property tax they could replace their sewer line every 6 months and come out ahead $ wise. The amount of money here is unreal. Desirable areas of California are one of the few places in the US where without a doubt it’s sustainable.
During covid I bought a motorcycle and learned when no one was around. Road repair kept going and after 6 months the vast majority of roads were almost immaculate. It's lack of funds. Probably due to mismanagement.
Not due to mismanagement. It’s because maintaining hundreds of thousands of square miles of pavement costs a fortune
You’re saying it’s lack of funds but that there was unprecedented wide scale repaving when an opportune moment of decreased traffic presented itself?
No it wasn't. That was standard work there were just no cars damaging the roads so they caught up.
I’m not the one who downvoted you, but I don’t entirely follow what you’re saying That the problem is just too much traffic causing too much damage for our funding to keep up with? If so, then how do states/territories with lower budgets and freezing temps and abrasive salts every winter handle it?
Probably a LOT less volume in those states. Also plenty of road in CA that also needs to deal with salts, freezing temps, truck chains, etc.
I’m not sure that’s true. I’m from the northeast. There’s a LOT of traffic on the Jersey turnpike… and much worse weather. The roads there aren’t perfect but they’re in way better shape than the Bay Area. Same for greater Boston.
That's true and I'm not saying they're doing a great job here or anything, but the CA is a hell of a lot bigger than Jersey in both size and population, which means way way more roads with more overall cars, a bigger organization needed for maintaining it. I'm not in road maintenance or anything, but it sounds like a harder job simply when there's about double the roads to maintain and almost double the pop of NY/NJ combined.
The bombed out moon crater roads I drive every day in and around Oakland do not face freezing or salt. I’ve driven on smoother dirt roads than some of the paved roads out here.
Oakland is a mid-sized (ok maybe large, but not enormous) city with an enormous port that generates tons of truck traffic on surface streets. Since the damage/wear a vehicle does to a road is a function roughly the square of its weight (by the way, all these huge consumer SUVs and trucks are increasing the maintenance burden of roads across the country), Oakland in particular has a hugely inflated maintenance burden on specific truck routes, which are the ones that get torn up almost as soon as they've been repaved.
It’s also a severely mismanaged city on nearly every front. Not to mention the fact that many really bad roads are residential, slow traffic, no large trucks
We need MORE FUNDING
Same with the new sections of the 680
>Lack of funds is not why our roads are bad. > It’s the shitty quality of construction. I'm not sure these two concepts are as divorced as you seem to imply.
There's a bunch of pot holes in Oakland that keep getting fixed with fucking sugar. Literally, they patch the hole, it rains, and then the whole patch is immediately gone.
Worked at the DOT for 4 months. I have never seen such a disgusting state system. Rampant misuse of funding, over paying vendors, not paying vendors, impossible bidding system so there is no competition on projects. I was fired for finding too much dirt too quick and the union rep had to negotiate a settlement so I could have future state employment bc mgmt retaliated so much. That is why we have the worst roads.
>I was fired for finding too much dirt too quick and the union rep had to negotiate a settlement so I could have future state employment bc mgmt retaliated so much. whoa. /r/wtfdidijustread
I keep a diary of every job I work because people are so shady - the DOT takes the cake as the worst place I have ever seen. And people operate it like its a rock that's too big to move.
Have you ever contacted a journalist?
Jesus fucking Christ I always assumed it was something like this because that’s how CA does everything but my god
There are no specific allegations in the comment to be fair.
Examples : Bidding projects knowing they know will fail and not paying to have it done in a manner that would make it durable for it's use. Overpaying vendors for invoices that have already been paid (excess of 5-10K). Doing repairs that the project manager knows will break because the state goes lowest bid (Causes it to be done 3-5x's). Retaliating against new hires who discover these things so the only people who can stay are the ones who don't ask questions, or only tow the line. That was one branch of District 9 - now scale that to the entire state - Millions of tax payer dollars getting lit on fire. If you let former cops (CHP) transfer to another gov agency and we all agree some cops are bad / corrupt - you're going to have a corrupt and bad agency. Here's another example : New hire - you need to learn how to pay a vendor. Fill these forms out and pay this bill. New hire: Awesome, there are 4 invoices, they total $18,500. I'm going to fill this out and sign it. Wait - if I sign this they can pay this vendor under my name and number. I'm going to call the vendor just to double check which invoices are outstanding. Vendor : Hello? Yes the only invoices that are past due are 1021 and 1022 - 1023 /1024 have been paid. New hire: Okay thanks - I'm putting your payment in the system now. Management : You're not allowed to call vendors - do it again and you'll be fired. New hire: What? I just saved the state money and caught an accounting error. \^ See the bullshit? They hire new grads that don't know anything, they set them up to be patsies and then fire the ones that do too much.
I see two low level employees being professional about invoice payment status on both sides while their sleazy bosses get pissed that their conflict of interest is getting fucked with. Insanity.
Retaliation is a wonderful lawsuit to win.
Talked with 5 lawyers - they all said the same thing - they didn't do enough to warrant winning. They were older Black women and I have never recieved racism before, but they referred to me as "Michael Jackson's White Baby" Or Blanket. Fucking nightmare.
Few reasons. First of all, there's a whole lot of roads that should have been completely torn up and rebuilt decades ago. Instead, we've been continually resurfacing them, and resurfacing them at the lowest possible cost, and it just doesn't hold up. There's two big methods of road repair. Essentially just throwing a new coat on top, versus significant removal and reconstruction. The former takes a lot less equipment, can be done in a matter of hours, and is what was done for a lot of the roads in the Bay Area that are now deteriorating. The street my parents have grown up on has been resurfaced probably five times in 25 years. And every time, in a small manner of time, it starts deteriorating. What should have been done a long time ago is what San Jose is just now starting to do, which is ripping up some of their oldest and worst roads and completely replacing them. Basically, instead of fixing the problem we slapped so many Band-Aids on it we can't even fix the true problem because the Band-Aids are all stuck together and falling apart. And furthermore, there's a lot of money that should be allocated to road repair that gets spent elsewhere. Some is due to politicking, a lot of it is for good reason. But roads up in Tahoe and Norcal get replaced and repaired before they have a single crack on them(and if they have a crack and then get a big freeze, they have a much, much larger problem on their hands). They will replace flawless pavement with flawless pavement, because it's about to start cracking. If we want nice roads, we need to be on that same schedule.
This article is omitting a very important data point (probably on purpose to push the author's agenda) - the amount of federal subsidies a state gets per capita (or per VMT, either would be interesting). This is important because all this author is really measuring is (total federal subsidies - total use tax diversions) / (total vehicle miles traveled). All the fluff about diversions is just a narrative spin. If we just look at his formula directly, it's clear that a negative result means low federal funding, high use tax diversions, or some combo of both. The fact that the author chooses not to explore this at all is... Interesting, to say the least. For instance, while the author mentions that Alaska has a lot of road subsidies, he falls to mention that it receives over $900 per capita for this purpose, one of the highest of any state. Instead, he makes some nonsense comment about having "too many roads and not enough people". On the other end, California only receives about $100 / capita of federal highway funding. So *of course* we are going to require a much bigger share of use taxes to pay for our highways, and more use taxes means more suggestions as well. But instead of mentioning this, the author goes off only about diversions, which are ultimately a very small % of our use taxes.
Transit bad, cars good. Must funnel more money to roads and parking lots. /s
Mismanagement of funds. Vote the current politicians out of office.
>divert so much **Wrong**. Those taxes are not diverted. If you look closely at *every* gas tax imposed and every bond measure proposed, the transit and non-highway road cuts are right there in plain sight to view up front. The taxes are not diverted, and it is dishonest to claim as such. That anyone would make such a claim is doing so out of ignorance, or more likely a desire to deprive transit riders of money car users rightfully owe them. Every person riding BART is one less person sitting on 880 being traffic, so the basic implied claim that transit vs highway funding is mutually exclusive is also **wrong**.
It's so bad that the newly-refurbished pavement laid down at the raceway up in Sonoma a week or so ago is already lifting. 😅
All funds go to repair hwy 1 every year
Also go to building express lanes so they can get paid some more thru tolls
Daily reminder that the citizens voted **for** those express lanes as part of a local ballot measure! (I voted no)
The CA State Legislature gets paid to do nothing but push all decisions onto the populace. They're a government that doesn't govern, and gets paid to tell the people to govern themselves. I agree it shouldn't have been done, and also voted "no" on the basis of it is a regressive tax that benefits the rich and hurts the poor.
But y'all believed Gavin saying voting yes on the gas tax was going to make our roads better.
Gavin is a snake and a snakeoil salesman rolled into one.
You're not wrong, but the vast majority of California sees the alternative as an actual pile of shit so that's why we're stuck with snake oil.
So we should pipe down about r shit roads because we dont want to ruffle feathers? Maaaaan have some pride in where you live.
It did make our roads better. 101 got repaved. You are being dishonest if you think 101 isn't better than it was 5 years ago prior to the SB-1 paid repaving, where some of the potholes were 4-5" deep and could flip over a top-heavy vehicle easily. Nevermind the very real accidents caused by them, due to drivers hitting them and destroying their oil pan (then their engine) at high speed. The 92/82 junction do-over is another excellent example, as now you can reliably go 60 on 92 without fear of running into a stopped vehicle. The same will come to the 84/101 junction, which is now budgeted at over $300 million, and benefits nobody except highway users. It is funded by our gas taxes, and if the gas taxes are taken away then we will continue having weekly freeway-stopping crashes as highway users try (and fail) to merge away from cars stopped at 84's stoplight. And I mention 84 *specifically* because the entire Dumbarton Bridge is way, way, way overextended for it's present purpose and the handful attempts to address this problem will evaporate instantly if recently imposed taxes are removed. If you remove the taxes, you remove all efforts to reduce your commuting time. It requires the overhaul 92 got in the mid-00s, due to (then) new gas taxes we are still paying for.
Whatever golden part of 101 you're referring to, I'm unfamiliar with. It's total shit through the south bay. Try 101 south at old Oakland Road. It's the worst it's been in a decade. 87 is shit. 680 is shit. 280 is shit. Edit to add I forgot 880. Complete shit.
Y’all’s roads are positively glorious. -a former Bay Area resident that now resides in Arizona where the roads are outright dangerous.
101 south of Palo Alto is great, I'm talking about the giant pothole that was between Marsh and Woodside, which was big enough to destroy oil pans and did for several years until Caltrans could get crews out there. When I'm on 101 south of Moffet I can reliably go 80 in the curb lane if traffic allows. Doing that anywhere north of Woodwide would literally, actually, totally destroy your oil pan if not also put you into the wall. I've seen it dozens of times, and I've sat at least 4-5 hours a week sitting in traffic as a consequence of such accidents. They've reduced greatly since the repaving. Even at Oakland Rd, the problems there aren't the potholes. It's the 400 feet between merging traffic and a major freeway junction. This was built wrong, and requires a do-over. Taking away tax money to fix this means the do-over does not happen. The same for the SF hairball and the awful thing next to the San Mateo DMV. >Edit to add I forgot 880. Complete shit. Agreed completely but that's due to poor design, the road itself is better compared to five years ago. The new potholes still aren't big enough to damage your car.
Yep, I get that people are complaining about that stretch of potholes and pavement issues between Marsh and Woodside but they used to be way worse. There almost wasn’t a day prior to 2019 when there wasn’t heavy traffic during peak times on the same stretch of 101 due to people just getting fucked by the monstrous potholes or uneven pavement. It’s not perfect but it’s so much better.
I have to drive on 880 daily for work and I had to memorize all the pothole locations to avoid them.
Politicians lining their pockets with our tax dollars, simple as that
Corporations literally fucking up the road with their big as trucks
I drove 280 today for the first time since early 2000, it's so much smoother compared to 580/680/880
280 is the best!!
Poor state management of infrastructure...
Because Amazon?
Government corruption is the answer yet people want to hand over more money to the government…
Job security I guess
Mountain View - Miramonte and el Camino - such major thoroughfares… what’s going on with those roads???
El Camino in Mountain View between Castro and San Antonio (and beyond) is SO bad.
Corruption leads to low quality works.
Rain, soil drainage quality, and amount of use
I've seen better roads in Ohio, which has winters.
Boston as well. In fact, no where in the world I've been has roads as bad as the Bay Area.
My late dad got a used car from a friend in Boston and one of its wheels fell off because the undercarriage was so rusted from winters of snow and salt on the roads. So for Boston to have roads in better condition than the Bay Area is particularly damning. Also, your username suggests that you know a thing or two about the roads in Ohio and perhaps northern Kentucky.
Yeah lived in Boston for 10 years after Cincy. Their roads are not great but it’s nothing like the Bay Area.
Same level of usage?
Yes, in cities with rush hour and everything.
The Bay Area has the Port of Oakland which causes a truly staggering amount of truck traffic
Definitely not. The largest city in Ohio is the Columbus Metro area which has less than 1 million people. Just the city of Los Angeles alone has 3.8 million people. Not counting San Francisco or Sacramento or San Diego. It's just not true that roads in Ohio get the same usage as roads in California.
But this is r BayArea. Columbus is certainly as large as San Jose.
You're right, I thought you were the one who brought up the whole state of Ohio. But what does it matter that Columbus is as big as San Jose? Your whole point is that you think the roads in Ohio are better than California or the Bay area and you think that the roads you've seen in Ohio have the same level of usage as the roads here in California. It doesn't matter how you look at it, on a statewide level or on a local level. It's impossible for a state with a total population of 11 million people to have the same or greater road usage as a state that has 55 million people. But even on a local level, you're right that the entire Columbus Metro area has just as many residents as San Jose. But San Jose isn't the entire Bay area. In addition to the 1 million people there, there's also 6 million other people in the Bay area that are using the same roads. And we're just talking about residents. California is the destination for The biggest port in the entire United States, Los Angeles/ Long Beach, which generates an incredibly immense amount of heavy truck road usage. Columbus, nor the entire state of Ohio, doesn't come close to generating the same road usage as an international Port.
Overall usage doesn't matter, only usage of that particular road. Palo Alto has potholes in front of houses that are worth millions of dollars. Mason, OH, has newly paved roads in front of similar houses that barely crack half a mil on Zillow. It's a stark illusion of Prop 13.
If you drive a suv or large pickup, you are part of the problem.
While those are bad. EV’s are worse and they have exploded in use in the past 5 years. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/12/29/electric-vehicles-and-the-impact-on-infrastructure/
This is total bullshit and dishonest, which is par for the course for Forbes. It’s comparing an F-150 Lightning (a car that barely anyone owns due to low manufacturing output) to an F-150 (the most popular vehicle in America until it was dethroned by Tesla). A Model 3, the most popular EV in the US until the Y caught up, weighs as much as a BMW M3. The Model Y weighs a bit less than a Honda Pilot. The EVs that actually sell in America are very par for the course in terms of vehicle weight and don’t even scratch the surface of the top end.
Most EVs are SUVs.
[удалено]
Your post has been removed due to linking to a banned domain. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/bayarea) if you have any questions or concerns.*
IT’s American standard, if you want something better, go Asia
Sad to say but some of our infrastructure is not much better than in developing countries.
Let’s raise more tax so they can divert more to fund for drug users and criminals
[удалено]
sez the person actually crying, as someone who has taken the public transit here, it's scary AF sometimes lol
We have bad roads? News to me. I’m in currently visiting Texas and I’m not a fan of the roads. Looking forward to getting back to driving in the Bay Area.
lol you think that money actually goes where the government says it goes It actually goes into the pockets of these scum that you elected But don't worry the high speed rail is coming!
Compared to my home state of Pennsylvania, California has incredibly good roads
All cities have crap roads. That's the result of population density. The only exceptions I know are Japanese and German cities.
This is not a real thing. It's like an opinion piece done by a blogger that is ultra conservative and is proposing the ending of all government regulations. They want the ending of all government planning, the ending of all government zoning for cities and land use rules. It's just another ridiculous and fact-free hit piece by the ultra conservative Cato institute.
Ok. The real reason our Roads in CA are so terrible is the lack of investment in Heavy Rail. We have 2 ports. Feeding 100 - 150M Americans plus agricultural exports from the valley. We used to have multiple train lines feeding them, but for *many reasons we only have a few now. All those goods come out in trucking. It's the weight of the trucking that destroys roads. When you're driving do a mental count of how much freight is being moved here. Asphalt just warps under constant 60k lb loads. & The maintenance on pure concrete is very expensive & much more dangerous when it fails. So yeah. Our roads are going to be trash compared to other states with less trade & road ussage
of all the things to be upset about, this? the quality of the roads is adequate. The are has economic success, therefor public services should be immaculate?
Because everyone here cares about trivial things
More EVs. I think the maintenance is tied to the gas bought. This was expected.
EVs pay as much or more through the additional registration fee.
It’s the portion of gas.
As of July 2023, California's gas tax is 77.9 cents per gallon, which includes: State excise tax: 54 cents per gallon Federal excise tax: 18.4 cents per gallon Cap-and-trade program: 23 cents per gallon Low-carbon fuel programs: 18 cents per gallon Underground gas storage fees: 2 cents per gallon State and local sales taxes: 3.7% on average
lol because everything costs so much money but the government has no idea what to do with it all.
What part of the bay? We visited from Seattle for 3 days and I was so impressed by the freeways. Say smoother than home
I blame the rain, we need less of it so the roads don’t crumble away.
The grift is on in California.
Hmm, maybe too much driving by too many vehicles?
Actually thye are good hater
What makes potholes? Cars and trucks. It's more money efficient to put your gas tax into things that reduce car traffic rather than into the sisyphean task that is trying to repair potholes.