The map shows roads included in Carson City’s 2022 Pavement Condition Survey. Streets with higher scores are marked in blue and green, while lower scores are highlighted in shades of yellow, orange, and red.
A “good” road often scores 70 or higher on the Pavement Condition Index, according to Carson City’s Transportation Manager Chris Martinovich. But a survey presented to the Carson Area Metropolitan Planning Organization last week found that Carson City roadways average 62 PCI.
“Overall, the roads, particularly our local and our neighborhood streets, are continuing to deteriorate,” Martinovich said during the meeting.
The survey covered 363 lane miles throughout Carson City using a “sophisticated van” to collect data points like pavement cracking, raveling, surface deformations, and more, Martinovich said.
He added, “Essentially, they drive over the roads and this van has equipment attached to the front and back of the van where they collect 20 different deficiencies of our roads.”
Regional roads scored a 74 PCI and local roads scored a 56. Compared to 2017, that’s a 10 percent improvement to regional roads, but a 9 percent hit to local roads.
The changes not only reflect projects like the South Carson Street improvements, but also new roads added to the network.
Performance District 3 is a good example. Spanning east of Interstate 580 and south of Highway 50, it’s the only area that saw a very modest improvement in local road conditions since 2017. But that’s not because of any city reconstruction projects. Rifle Range Road and Schulz Ranch added new, good-condition roads to the survey sample between 2017 and 2022, boosting its numbers.
In fact, since at least 2019, if not further back, the Board of Supervisors has not invested funding in local roads Martinovich said. He partially attributed it to the 2019 updates to the city Pavement Management Plan. It prioritizes high-traffic regional roads.
And the effects show, especially in Performance District 2 and 4 that suffered a respective 18 and 13 percent decline in local road pavement conditions over five years. Both score in the low 50s for local road PCI.
On the other hand, district 4 also saw big gains in regional road conditions after the South Carson Street reconstruction project. Its regional road PCI increased almost 30 percent.
The disconnect between local and regional roads is something that the Board of Supervisors is fully aware of.
In September 2021, Mayor Lori Bagwell, who chairs RTC and CAMPO, held a discussion and asked attendees to tell her what city programs she should cut to fund road maintenance, especially local road maintenance. She made the point that city funding is limited and investing every penny into the roads forces other programs to suffer.
Though, “The cost of delaying just means things get more expensive,” she said. She later added, “The cracks are getting wider. Things are growing in the cracks.”
