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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Tuesday, May 6, 2003

EDITORIAL
Pothole hell deserves more public attention

Anyone who has taken a bone-rattling, hubcap spinning drive around O'ahu recently knows our roads are far from their best condition. And it doesn't seem to matter much whether they are city or state roads.

As transportation writer Mike Leidemann reported yesterday, the jolts and bumps are not just your imagination. The streets are in relatively poor condition and the explanation is the one you might expect: money.

Money has been tight at both the city and state for several years now. One of the first things that seems to go, or at least get delayed, is maintenance. This applies to maintenance of buildings, of grounds and of roads and highways.

It is a logical decision if you think of it. If there are two dollars worth of demand and only one dollar to spend, you spend it where the need is most critical. Deferring or delaying maintenance is hardly ever a life or death situation.

So the decision, Leidemann reports, is to stretch out the maintenance cycle. At the state, officials have stretched out the regular maintenance cycle from 10 years to 13 years. At the city, the repair budget was down to the point where the city could repair only 35 lane-miles of city streets (a lane mile is one 10-foot wide lane one mile long). That's a tiny fraction of the total inventory of city streets and roads.

The big problem here — and officials are only too aware of it — is that this process really makes no financial sense. Delaying full-scale repairs only boosts the cost of making the fixes when they become inevitable.

For instance, skimming over the top of a pothole or a crack in the road rather than rebuilding the road properly allows water to get to the subsurface. This erodes and degrades the roadbed proper, forcing far more expensive repairs over the long term.

Another part of the equation is the impact on vehicles — public and private — that must use poorly maintained roads. Leidemann reports one local engineering study put the extra repair and operating costs for local motorists at $114 million a year, or $151 per individual motorist. That's a huge opportunity cost that must be put on the balance sheet against whatever was saved by delaying repairs.

Roadwork is not glamorous, and politicians understandably would prefer to spend tax dollars where there are more rewards: Either on badly needed public services or on improvements that catch the eye and please the consumer.

But the point is these basic infrastructure costs are not being avoided, they are simply being passed on to someone else who will have to deal with a much bigger bill.

Both the state and city must push to shrink back the repair cycle, avoid patchwork and temporary repairs wherever possible and see to it that taxes collected for streets and highways are used for that purpose and none other.

And they must push harder to get agreements from utilities and others who tear up streets to coordinate their work with government's longer-term resurfacing schedule.