September 12, 2005

County Report

South Bay streets, roads shine in pavement quality evaluation

By County Supervisor Jim Beall
Special to the Times

To honor Bay Area cities and counties for their street smarts, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s (MTC) Pave-ment Management Program presented its 2004–05 awards for outstanding achievement in local streets and road maintenance. Considering the challenging economy and insufficient funding for roads improvements, Santa Clara County received some good news.

Five Santa Clara County cities—Santa Clara, Sunny-vale, Los Altos, Campbell and Mountain View—earned statewide recognition, in the system report for 2004 issued by MTC and Caltrans, for very good pavement conditions on their local streets and roads.

The ratings are based on the 100-point scale MTC’s Pavement Management Program uses to calculate overall pavement quality in Bay Area cities and counties. The “very good” category includes cities and counties with pavement condition index (PCI) scores of 75 or higher.

The city of Santa Clara, which led all Bay Area jurisdictions in the State of the System 2003 rankings, tied with unincorporated Contra Costa County for the number-two spot in the 2004 report, with a PCI score of 86. Sunnyvale ranked fourth in the region with a PCI score of 84 and Los Altos came in at fifth with an 83. Campbell’s PCI score of 78 ranked eleventh in the region and Mountain View tied for number 16 with a PCI score of 75.

Unincorporated San-ta Clara County earned a “good” rating with a PCI score of 73, up nine points from the previous year. Rank-ings in the 2004 report are based on 2003 pavement quality data. The 86 registered by Santa Clara in 2003 matched its chart-topping score from 2002. Although there is always more that can be done to improve our road surfaces, I congratulate our local cities for their pavement management accomplishments.