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Bill  On The Road

 by: Bill Oetinger  12/1/2008

The Cheap Seal Blues

We're hearing a lot lately about grand plans to shore up our country's crumbling infrastructure, not only because the assorted bits of the infrastructure sorely need it, but also as a New Deal type of economic jump start, providing jobs for many who are currently unemployed or marginally employed. I'm a great fan of the original New Deal, at least as I understand it from my readings of history and from personal observation of its legacy, as evidenced by some of the results of those famous make-work programs: places like Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood (a WPA project) and the restoration of Mission La Purisima Concepcion in Lompoc (a CCC project), to name just a couple of wonderful landmarks that are now considered historic treasures.

However, all the great work done by the New Deal, as grand as it was, didn't end the Depression. As we are being reminded in the press these days, to do that, it took the biggest make-work project of all time: World War II. So I don't expect our new-age New Dealers to magically pull some glossy, fat rabbit out of that tattered old top hat anytime soon. We've dug ourselves into a pretty deep hole, and it's going to take awhile to climb out. But at least we seem to be pointing in the right direction, with the right priorities at the top of the to-do list.

It would be nice to think that this current stimulus package would include projects as creative and aesthetically inspiring as a Timberline Lodge, but I suspect 99% of whatever gets done will be more mundane; things like rebuilding bridges and schools, creating wind farms and water treatment plants. And that is probably the way it should be: nuts-and-bolts stuff first and then the fancy, artisan-craftsman frills later, if we can manage it.

But in the realm of nuts-and-bolts, practical, everyday projects, one that really resonates for this die-hard road biker is pavement. I might go so far as to say that a good paving job can almost aspire to be one of those lofty, aesthetically inspiring projects for me, especially if I encounter it while grooving a slinky descent at 40 miles per, skimming along on a new, satin-smooth, wall-to-wall carpet of best-quality tar.

I don't know if any of that New Deal largesse will ever trickle down to the little back roads of Sonoma County, my particular cycling playground. I don't suppose they're too high a priority in the grand scheme of things. They don't even seem to be much of a priority in the eyes of those who make the budget decisions right here within the county. Once each year, some civic entity in the greater San Francisco Bay Area--possibly the Association of Bay Area Governments--publishes a list of the best and worst roads in the region, county by county. Every year, for as long as I have been paying attention, Sonoma County has ranked last in this survey...the worst roads around, at least in terms of pavement quality.

I have bragged for many years--often in this space--about the vast inventory of great cycling roads in this county, which collectively make this a cycling mecca of sorts. In my January, 2000 column, I stated that there are over 1200 miles of excellent biking back roads in the county. I cannot now recall how I came up with that figure. Perhaps I just got out a map and added them up. A few of those roads are going to be state highways, paved and maintained by Caltrans. But the bulk will be the responsibility of Sonoma County Public Works. The huge number of miles of rural county roads is, in this context, both a blessing and a curse. Whenever that Bay Area survey of roads comes out, some spokesperson for the county will attempt to explain how we have so many miles of roads and never enough funds to maintain them all (and how so many of them were never built to high standards to begin with, hence needing more maintenance in the long run).

We accept all that as an article of faith around here. We more or less agree to put up with the worst pavement in the region in exchange for having lots of it; quantity versus quality, I guess. If that has to be our particular Faustian bargain, I can live with it. I do glory in all those miles of little roads, and if the option were half as many miles but all of them well-paved, I would stick with what we've got, potholes and all. But I can't help wishing and wondering whether it has to be that sort of either-or equation; whether we cannot in fact have both many roads and good pavement.

All of this has been on my mind lately, not only because of the much ballyhooed New Deal rumblings coming out of Foggy Bottom, but also because of a different kind of new deal--or new seal--making its appearance along our local, benighted back roads. Chip seal, or as I think of it: cheap seal. Chip seal is nothing new for us. It has been the pavement of choice for our public works department forever. What is new and has caught the public's attention is a switch to a much larger, coarser aggregate being used in new chip seal jobs.

According to the county officials quoted in our daily fish wrap, the goal was to get the biggest bang for the buck out of their meager paving budget; to lay down a surface that would be inexpensive and yet durable. Figures were trotted out to support the premise that this new surface will provide a cost-effective alternative to real paving, that is, the sort of paving where a huge machine lays down an entirely new--and smooth--road.

With this new, larger aggregate, they hope to get about seven years out of a paving job, and they claim they can do 20 miles this way for $1 million. In contrast, real paving may last 20 years but costs about a million a mile. If cost and durability were all that mattered, that would be a no-brainer. And it seems those are the only considerations that matter in these parlous times. But what is being lost in the penny-pinching process is quality. All chip-sealed roads are lousy, but these new, coarser ones are outrageously awful.

When it comes to pavement quality, skinny-tired road bikes and their riders are the true arbiters of what is good and not good. We feel every bump and crack and all the subtle variations in the abrasiveness of the top coat. By the measure of our hyper-sensitivity, super-coarse chip-seal is a nightmare...pretty nearly a worst-case scenario. The only saving grace with this new process is that they are finishing the job with a coat of slurry that helps to bind the aggregate and take a bit off an edge of the sharpest facets of the rock. This last step is often optional on chip jobs, but at least in the current wave of projects, it is being included.

Speaking of those sharp facets on the rock chips, we are seeing two different kinds of rock used on our poor roads these days. When they began this new regime, they were contracting with one quarry for rock crushed with an impact crusher. (Picture smashing rocks with a hammer.) But that quarry's machinery broke down, so they started buying rock elsewhere that was being crushed in a cone crusher, which yields a larger, more sharply faceted stone. So while some sections of our new pavement are very coarse, other sections are very, very coarse. Worse and worser.

All of this adversely affects cyclists in a number of ways. First of all, it's simply unpleasant to ride over...abrasive. It's also unsafe. A steady ration of gravel chips breaks loose over time and shoals up in corners and on the shoulders where riders can skid out in it and even cut tires on it. Chips kicked up by the wheels of passing cars and trucks turn into mini-missiles. I've already heard from a couple of riders who have been hit in the face by these itty bitty buzz bombs. And the surface is inefficient. One fellow in our club drives one of these newly resurfaced roads in his car every day. It's one of the new cars with a miles-per-gallon read-out on the dash, and he insists his mileage has dropped by 3-mpg on the new chip, a factor of about 10%. Admittedly, that is highly anecdotal, but it stands to reason that there would be some loss of efficiency associated with rolling over a coarser surface. Considering the puny wattage cyclists have to work with, we are not going to be happy with any surface that forces us to work 10% or even 5% harder for the same forward motion. Using 5% or 10% more gasoline in our cars is not exactly a boon for our collective carbon footprint either.

Finally, I get a serious dose of the willies when I think about crashing on that super-abrasive surface. The road rash would be terrible, in all likelihood leaving permanent scarring. If one were unlucky enough to do a major face-plant on this grinder, you might be looking at extensive plastic surgery to set things right. I wonder if the cost-benefit analysis the county has done in choosing this low-ball, cost-cutting solution has factored in the potential for a seven-figure lawsuit prompted by such an accident. I'm not the kind of person who goes around filing lawsuits at the drop of a bike, but other people might be, and in this case, I can envision a scenario where someone could be well justified in doing exactly that.

Chip seal is usually laid down over an already paved road, with the ostensible goal of preserving the existing pavement before it falls apart. In some cases, it is applied over roads that have very good, very smooth pavement. In fact, our county works folks say the best time to apply the chip is when the road underneath is in top-notch shape. We have seen this philosophy in action now on several of our rural roads, including some which were formerly delightfully well-paved. Putting chip over a top-quality paving job drives me crazy. It seems akin to taking a beautiful painting and covering it in duct tape to preserve it. Okay, maybe not the best analogy, but something like that. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Having a nice sofa and covering it with hideous, plastic slip covers...ones that can't be removed when company comes over.

My favorite local example of the folly of chip seal is a nice road called Pleasant Hill. From my driveway, I can be riding on it in about 3/4's of a mile, and it's a gateway to dozens of good roads to the west and south of here. So I'm on it frequently and have been for over 20 years. It used to have rather funky pavement, but some time in the early 90's, they did the right thing and paved it all--about six miles of it--to a very high standard. Smooth as silk. I was in heaven. It stayed that way for several years, but then they chipped half of it...the first three miles coming out of the town of Sebastopol. (I have to presume the logic for covering half of it was that the end of the road closer to town gets more traffic. I have no doubt this is true, although my own observation is that the traffic load appears very nearly the same over its entire length. The difference in traffic counts would have to be minimal.) In the several years since then, the portion of the road that was not chipped has held up quite well. There are a few cracks here and there and a few patches. But overall, it's still a good, solid, smooth surface. The portion that was chipped, however, is constantly in need of repair. That nice asphalt under the chip seal may be in terrific shape, but the chip on top is forever falling apart.

I think of our county work crews as chip junkies. Once they start using the stuff, they're hooked. They condemn themselves to an endless cycle of day-to-day repairs. It's a sisyphean task; never ending; always repeating. When the county big boys do their calculations on cost per mile, I wonder if they include the on-going costs of having those crews out there patching up the raggedy-assed chip again and again.

The fact that we do--or did--have a few well-paved roads that can be covered in chip proves that at least some paving contractors in the county know how to do the job properly (for instance, that quality job done once on Pleasant Hill). I don't know enough about the various contracts and job specs to understand why some roads are done to such high standards while so many others are slipshod and skanky. In fact, it's probably time for me to insert my standard disclaimer: I don't know nearly enough to make any sort of expert assessment of why our roads are generally so bad compared to those in our neighboring counties or in other areas, further afield, where I have ridden. Over the course of a quarter-century in this county, I have observed, as any cyclist would, the vagaries of the many paving and repaving projects that have come along. I read the paper and I pay attention to whatever comes my way in terms of information from any available source, be it county officials, representatives of the bicycle advisory committees, paving contractors, and so forth. I have groused and ranted so frequently about this to anyone who would listen that, like the squeaky wheel, I have been favored with a few memos and factoids from those who claim to be in the know. But all of it doesn't amount to enough insider info to really do the topic justice. In the end, I'm just another rank-and-file citizen, bewildered by the ways in which our government does things.

And a further disclaimer while I'm throwing them around: I really do appreciate that our county has a tough row to hoe in this department, and it's getting tougher. Every facet of local government is strapped for funds, and the costs keep going up. The latest wrinkle concerns the supply of asphalt, the key ingredient in pavement. When gas was retailing for over $4.00 a gallon, it finally became cost-effective for refineries to install expensive cokers to convert the funkiest sorts of crude oil into gasoline. Formerly, about 40% of any barrel of crude was crummy stuff that was only good for making asphalt. Now it's down to 10%. The end result is a shortage of asphalt for road work and, because of that scarcity, a spike in the price to almost triple what it was a couple of years ago. Cash-strapped counties and municipalities are having to dig deeper than ever to pay for the black magic that makes the roads nice...and that's if they can even get the stuff. Many jobs have been delayed until the supply pipeline opens up. (For more details on this new problem, check out this article.)

But in spite of the many challenges it faces, I still am left with the feeling that road maintenance is being mismanaged in this county. Chip seal--coarse, super-coarse, or otherwise--isn't the only way in which our county distinguishes itself as the worst of the Bay Area counties. I sometimes get the feeling that nobody really cares all that much. I recall one case where a better-than-average job was done on a road, except one section was decidedly crappy. The paving machine had a hiccup that lasted for a hundred feet or so, leaving the surface rough. One of my bike club friends was on the county bike advisory board at the time and he brought the bad patch to the attention of the county. They sent an inspector out to look it over, and their reply was: "Yes, it is substandard. It does not meet the job specs. But it's not bad enough to make the contractor go back out and fix it." Excuse me? It seems to me, if our tax dollars paid this contractor to pave that road, then by golly he should be expected to follow the job specs and get it right, and to fix it if it isn't right. What kind of lackadaisical management is this? I think we deserve better.

In contrast, an identical glitch occurred with the paving machine when Caltrans was resurfacing a section of Highway 12 west of Santa Rosa a few years back: about 100 yards of rough pavement. I figured we were going to have to live with it, but the Caltrans inspectors called the contractor back out there and they dug up the entrire stretch and did it over. That's the way it's supposed to work.

Then there's the maddening habit the crews have around here of driving their dump trucks through the newly laid, soft asphalt, leaving behind an imprint of their big tire treads for us to rumble over. These are almost as bumpy and jarring as real rumble strips. (You don't want to get me started on rumble strips.) In the same vein, there is, on one road near here, a clear imprint of big booted footsteps running up the side of the road for 50 yards on a little hill, right along the side of the road where a cyclist would be riding. Obviously, someone on the crew tromped across the new pavement while it was still soft. The prints are so deep and well-defined, I'm sure Sherlock Holmes could tell us exactly what size and brand of boots the guy was wearing. What were they thinking? With both the truck and boot prints, the phrase that comes to mind is: not clear on the concept. We're paving a road here: it's supposed to be smooooooth, right?

That brings to mind another cob job we have to live with here: they rebuilt a bridge over the Russian River on Alexander Valley Road a few years back. The new bridge was designed with nice, wide shoulders which would have been perfect for helping cyclists stay away from traffic. Except that the concrete they put down on these nice, wide shoulders looks as if it was smoothed out by hand...I mean by patting it smooth with one's palms, like children making mud pies. It's so uneven, it's pretty much useless as a surface for riding. Haven't these clowns heard of a bull float? And who had oversight on the project? Who signed off on it for the county?

I could go on...and on...and on... I have 1200 miles' worth of examples and grievances. But I will cease soon; will try to rein in my wilder rants and wrap this up.

I know our county has a challenging task in keeping all its lovely little roads looking as good as the scenery around them. I must sound like an ungrateful wretch for not thanking them for all the hard work that they do accomplish, especially when they do the job well; when the pavement is not patch-on-patch or chip-seal, but a smooth, silky ribbon. But the fact that they can and do get it right some of the time only begs the question as to why they can't do it all of the time or at least most of the time.

I freely admit that I am not privy to all the inner workings of the county's budget woes and the hard choices they have to make. But I can look around at other counties, other states, other countries, and I can see that somehow, most of them are managing their roads better than we are in Sonoma County. Surely some of them are as strapped for cash as we are. Surely some of them have the same revenues from property and sales and income taxes that we do and a similar number of miles of road to service. Why and how can they do it when we cannot?

For one final example, I offer this copy from my Central Virginia column of a few years ago...

"My exploration was confined to Madison, Greene, Albermarle, Nelson, and Rappahannock Counties, all off the SE side of the Blue Ridge. To put this in a perspective that at least means something to me--relating it to my own backyard--I note that these five little counties add up in square miles to just about the same area as Sonoma and Marin Counties combined: around 2000 square miles. And yet, while these two mostly rural California counties support a population of over 700,000, the five rural Virginia counties are home to less than 140,000. Same area...one fifth the crowd." (And to the point here: one fifth the tax base.)

And a little later in the same piece...

"One more thing I absolutely loved about the region: the pavement. I claim to be a connoisseur of cycling surfaces, and these roads rate right up at the top of my list. The worst road there would be above average in Sonoma County, and the best roads are as smooth as a baby's bottom. And the quality of the pavement isn't tied somehow to traffic flow. Some of the tiniest, least used roads had pavement like satin. It makes me wonder how these little counties, with their tiny tax bases, can afford to maintain the roads so well. Or else it makes me wonder why--in comparison--our own county's roads are so bad. But that's a rant for another day."

Well okay...it's finally another day, and I have finally had my rant. Thank you for listening. For the record, Marin County, the other half of my north bay geographical comparison above, does a much better job with its paving that we do (at least most of the time). The standard joke around here is that you don't need a sign to know you've crossed over into the next county; you just note the pavement. It is true that Marin is smaller and has fewer roads and at the same time is much more affluent, so they have all the advantages we lack, as our county apologists are forever pointing out. I won't argue that one. But my example of Central Virginia still stands, and I could say the same about any number of other regions where I have traveled and cycled: so many roads; so little money...and yet excellent pavement. If they can do it, why can't we?

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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