The City of Santa Rosa has approximately 500 miles of streets, making it the city with the fourth highest street mileage in the Bay Area (only San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco have more.) It would cost over $1.1 billion to replace the pavement of Santa Rosa’s entire street network.

The City uses a Pavement Management Program called StreetSaver®, to systematically organize and analyze massive amounts of inspection data about the condition of our street pavement. StreetSaver® was developed for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission based on asset management concepts that help identify cost‐effective strategies for pavement maintenance and rehabilitation. All Bay Area cities wishing to be eligible for federal and state grants for pavement projects must have a Pavement Management Program in place.

Each year, the City’s Materials Engineering team inspects approximately a quarter of the residential streets and half of the arterial and collector streets to assess the condition of the pavement. During a typical inspection, a trained Materials Engineering technician heads to a selected City street, determines a representative pavement section, and evaluates a list of defined pavement distresses. On asphalt roads, the inspector typically looks for and quantifies the extent of alligator cracking, block cracking, distortions, longitudinal and transverse cracking, patching, rutting, depressions, weathering and raveling. The inspection data is later entered into StreetSaver® which allows calculations about the condition of the roadway to be performed.

One such calculation is the generation of our City’s Pavement Condition Index or PCI. PCIs range from 0 to 100, with higher PCI values indicating better pavement conditions. On the City's Pavement Condition Map, green indicates Santa Rosa’s higher PCI streets, while red shows the streets in the worst condition. Currently (in 2016), Santa Rosa’s street network is rated at an average PCI of 60; for comparison, the average PCI Bay Area wide was 66 in 2016.

The City’s Materials Engineering team uses StreetSaver® to model how various types of maintenance and rehabilitation activities will impact our future PCI ratings. This allows us to strategize the most cost effective ways to extend pavement life and prioritize street maintenance so as to minimize the effects of long‐term deterioration. View a map of the preventative and reconstructive pavement treatments that have been completed between 2000-2015.

In recent years, maintenance of the City’s street network has grown ever more challenging because local, state and federal funding has been insufficient to meet identified needs. This funding shortfall is being experienced by cities throughout California and is expected to be an ongoing challenge for the foreseeable future. However, using StreetSaver® along with the evaluation and implementation of alternative paving technologies the City is able to determine where best to apply available funding.

Source: City of Santa Rosa