Home | Mobile | E-Mail Us | Privacy | Mtn Bike | Ride Director Login | Add Century/Benefit Rides
Home

Adventure Velo


Additional Info

Press Democrat Article


About Bill
Past Columns

 

Bill  On The Road

 by: Bill Oetinger  11/1/2013

Paving the way to a better world

Five years ago, I wrote a piece in this space called The Cheap Seal Blues. It was a rant about the crummy pavement in Sonoma County. I came down on the county government and public works crews like a load of bricks, not cutting them much slack. A few months later, I had an opportunity to meet with one of the heads of that public works department, the person in charge of paving. After walking a mile in his shoes, so to speak, I wrote a more conciliatory follow-up in another column. I was still not happy with the state of our roads, but acknowledged that all rural counties--and Sonoma County in particular--are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to funding for road work.

Today’s local paper has a front page story headlined "County’s Roads Worst," which only restates the same information we have been reading each year for the past many years: that Sonoma County ranks last among all the Bay Area counties in the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Pavement Condition Index. The problem is most acute on the scenic back roads which cyclists call home. There are 1378 miles of such roads in the county. That is a lot of miles. It’s part of what makes Sonoma County such a mecca for cyclists: all those miles of little lanes through the hills. But it’s also at least part of the reason why the pavement on so many of those roads is so bad. So many miles…so little money to maintain them all.

We’ve been here before. We’ve read the reports, ridden the roads, and puzzled over what to do about it. However, there is some very tiny hope for improvement…some encouraging signs, in spite of yet another failing report card. Having complained so stridently when I felt the county was doing a poor job with road maintenance, I feel it’s only fair to give them a salute now, when--amazingly--they are getting a few things right. It’s only a few things--only a few miles of roads with new pavement (67 miles in all, according to the newspaper story)--but it is better than it has been and quite a pleasant surprise to those of us who had pretty much given up on seeing any progress, ever again.

When we head out on our bikes now, we are enjoying the pleasant surprise of finding some bad old road now resurfaced with silky black asphalt. Part of West Dry Creek. Most of Eastside Road along the Russian River Valley. Petaluma-Valley Ford Road from Two Rock to Valley Ford (more or less). Bodega Highway near Freestone. Parts of Chileno Valley. Lichau Road and Roberts Road. And more… For those of us who have grown accustomed to potholes, patches, cracks, and all the rest of the scabrous crap that passes for pavement around here, these black satin sections are almost too much to take in. We’re giddy with it all.

To be sure, many of the roads getting the smooth new top coats are what we would call arterials or major collectors. Their traffic counts are higher and so they are closer to the top of the to-do list. They aren’t often the more remote roads that cyclists love best--King Ridge and Coleman Valley and the Geysers--but all of the roads listed above will be used by cyclists, some extensively. Paving the busier roads first has been the priority of the county for some time. They make that clear when explaining how they have to cherry pick the projects they can do with their limited resources. We get that.

There are some curious exceptions on that list though. Lichau Road is the most intriguing of the oddities: an obscure dead end heading up into the hills west of Cotati. It might be a bit of hyperbole to call it a world-class climb, but it is pretty darn nice. A little over 1400’ up in a little less than four miles, with a main pitch that averages over 10% for over a mile. The rest of the road is nice too, but that marquee pitch is quite spectacular…a challenge going up and a hoot coming back down…and now it has the nicest, smoothest new pavement through all of its slinky curves. Why did this remote, lightly-traveled road rate the new pavement? Perhaps because one of the leaders of SOSRoads (Save Our Sonoma Roads) lives up there. This grass roots organization has been lobbying hard for better road maintenance for the last few years. I have no doubt they have had a positive impact on spurring the works department to do more, to be better, and we all have benefited. But it also looks--in this one instance--as if the squeaky wheel got oiled.

When I visited the SOSRoads website recently, I noticed a link to a video of a conference called the Sonoma Valley Roads Summit. Watching the video is about as exciting as watching CSPAN, but if you’re interested in questions about how our road maintenance is funded, and what they do with whatever money they can scrape together, it can be quite fascinating. The keynote speaker was Susan Klassen, the current head of the Sonoma County Transportation and Public Works Department. She presented a nice slide show of pie charts and graphs that spelled the dilemma out pretty clearly: too many miles of roads; too few dollars to fix them. (You can download the whole set of charts at the same site.)

I’m not going to make your eyes glaze over with endless statistics about this. (At least I hope not.) But a few tidbits jumped out of Klassen’s presentation as being of interest.

• The federal gas tax hasn’t been raised to adjust for inflation since 1993…20 years. (Federal funds never get spent on our dinky back roads. They are earmarked for freeways and other big projects. But if there is a shortfall of federal funds for those big projects, some local funds may have to be diverted to help finish the projects, and those local moneys might have ended up being used on back roads.)

• California’s gas tax used to be levied as a sales tax…that is, as a percentage of money spent to buy gas. But some bright politicians got that changed a while back to be a tax per gallon, not per dollar. As anyone who has watched the numbers on a gas pump can attest, the dollars go up a lot more quickly than the gallons these days. Presumably, we’d like our tax to be levied on something that is going up all the time (dollars) rather than on something that is going down (gallons of gas).

• Yes, gas consumption is indeed going down in California. Thanks to more stringent CAFE standards, good work from the auto industry, and smart choices by consumers, we are burning substantially less gasoline than we were ten years ago. That is wonderful news for the environment, but not such good news when your funding for road repairs is tied to that diminishing consumption.

• As noted in my Cheap Seal Blues, another problem is the price of asphalt (reasons noted in the prior piece). It was a critical challenge five years ago, and it has only become more acute since then. In the past ten years, the price of asphalt has more than quadrupled, while the operating budget for the county’s road work has pretty much flat-lined. Put simply: the same amount of money that paved four miles of road ten years ago will now only pave one mile.

• State gas tax is divided up thusly: 56% goes to the state (for operations, capital construction, and safety). The remaining 44% is split evenly between cities and counties…the unincorporated areas outside the cities. So only 22 cents of every dollar ends up available for road maintenance on those country roads we love to ride. And of course the busier the road, the more likely it is to be well maintained, leaving our favorite little bike roads through the middle of nowhere at the absolute bottom of the pecking order for any funding or repair.

• But wait: there’s more (or less). What funds there may be are allocated among the state’s counties according to a simple formula: 75% is based on number of registered vehicles in a given county; 25% is based on number of road miles. This hugely favors the densely populated counties in the LA-San Diego metroplex and the big, suburban counties clustered around San Francisco Bay. Eight counties consume the lion’s share of gas tax revenue (Orange, Los Angeles, Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Ventura, San Diego). All of the smaller, more rural counties have to pick over the crumbs left after the big eight have eaten their fill.

It’s interesting to note that our next door neighbor, Napa County, receives just slightly less in the way of gas tax money than Sonoma County does, and yet their roads are generally in much better shape. But they have only a small fraction of the total miles of back roads that this county has, so they can spend more on each mile of road they do have.

Most of this is not new. I covered approximately the same ground in the essay five years ago. My reason for revisiting the matter at all is to point out the good job the county has been doing lately on a few of our roads. They represent only a small fraction of all the roads needing attention. But the point is: if given the funding, the county planners and engineers and crews can get the job done. They can lay down some of the sweetest black satin paving you’d ever want to roll along on your bike. And they would and could do more of it if they only had the money.

I don’t really want this to have a political spin, but unfortunately, it comes down to that. Thanks to the entrenched mentality of a rather vocal minority in this country, we are pretty much dead in the water on any number of infrastructure improvements we need to be making, with roads one of the key elements. We all want to live in a happy paradise, where everything works perfectly…but too many of us don’t want to pay for it.

You know the old saying: You get what you pay for. Or, more to the point: you don’t get what you don’t pay for…in this case, decent paving, respectable roads. Look around at most of the rest of the modern, industrialized world: they all pay about twice what we do for a gallon of gas. All that extra money isn’t going to the oil companies. It’s all taxes, being plowed back into infrastructure…covering the costs on the system imposed by the vehicles using the system. If you’ve ridden or driven in Europe, for instance, you can see the results: little side roads so beautifully paved and impeccably groomed, you’d think you were on a race track. In Europe, in Japan, in parts of the United States…wherever you see consistently excellent roads, chances are the citizens of that state or country or county voted for extra taxes to generate the funds to do the work.

The question is simple: do you want to keep all your money in your pocket and live in a world where the roads are crumbling back to goat tracks? Or do you want to spend a few bucks so that we can have roads that are appropriate to the 21st Century? The second of those options embodies what it means to be a part of a civilized community. Perhaps our elected representatives have been cowed for too long by those no-new-taxes fiduciary luddites. Perhaps it’s time to let them know that we don’t want to live in that world. We deserve better, and we’re ready to chip in to make it happen.

PS: That Sonoma Valley Roads Summit mentioned above focused on the roads in just that region: Sonoma Valley (a small part of Sonoma County). However, the statistics cited in the presentation were mostly relevant for the entire county. But while we’re mentioning Sonoma Valley, I am pleased to report another positive development in that region. Sonoma County Parks and Rec has put together a proposal for a paved bike trail running down the length of that valley, which would make a wonderful alternative for cyclists who now have to ride on busy Hwy 12 or Arnold Drive to move around that region. I wrote about this proposal in a column last year. Now I can tell you that Caltrans has agreed to fund the feasibility study for this trail project. It doesn’t mean the trail is a done deal; that we’ll be riding on it shortly. But it’s the first step in the long process that will eventually lead to that trail. Add this little snippet of good news to those other patches of silky new pavement out there. It all makes me feel more optimistic about our roads (and trails) than I have in a long time.

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



Rides
View All

Century's
View All

Links
Commercial
Bike Sites
Teams

Other
Advertise
Archive
Privacy
Bike Reviews

Bill
All Columns
About Bill

Bloom
All Columns
Blog

About Naomi

© BikeCal.com 2023