City officials plan to spend $500,000 to conduct a physical and videotaped inventory of conditions on every street on O'ahu, officials said yesterday.

The inventory would become the foundation of a decades-long pavement management system designed to offer motorists a pothole-free ride well into the future at the lowest cost, said Laverne Higa, director of the city's Department of Facilities Management.

"Right now, there are a lot of R-rated problems on our roads, things you don't want to show your children," traffic consultant Stephen Muench told the City Council yesterday. "The goal is to create a smooth ride for the public. That's the gold standard in pavement management."

Muench, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Washington who grew up in Kailua and still calls Hawai'i home, said bringing the city's long-neglected roads "up to snuff" will be a long-term proposition. "It's going to take a decade or two, not a year or two," he said.

As a first step, the city plans to physically measure the "roughness index" of roads using a machine that records how many micro-bumps a motorist experiences in each mile of driving, Higa said.

The results would then be sorted into categories of needed repairs, giving city officials their first scientific, objective inventory of the state of Honolulu's almost 1,500 miles of roadway. That will allow officials to begin a systematic approach to road maintenance and repairs, Higa said.

Until now, the city has largely relied on visual inspection of streets and complaints from politicians and motorists to decide which roads get repaired first. The new survey also will create the first-ever videotape archive documenting the condition of each road, Higa said.

How much will it cost to bring all roads up to minimum standards? No one can even begin to estimate until the inventory is completed, said William Paik, head of the Hawai'i Asphalt Paving Industry.

"The idea is to get a list of conditions back by May and come up with a plan of attack," Paik said.

No matter how much it costs, the best approach is to invest in early maintenance rather than waiting until roadways begin to fail, Muench said.

"The most difficult thing in creating a pavement preservation plan is finding the funding for it," Muench said.

City officials plan to pay for the new survey through existing budget money, even if it means cutting back on some other repairs planned for this year, Higa said.

But Council Public Works & Economic Development Committee chairman Rod Tam said the city instead should make a supplemental budget request. "If you take money out of the existing budget, it's only going to create more problems for us," he said.

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.