Sad State of City Streets

I asked the following question to a professional engineer regarding the City of San Angelo's draft street condition report.

Q:  Do you have any thoughts on what color roads should not be seal coated, i.e. they need a greater amount of work?  Is there a logical break in the scale for the amount of maintenance/reconstruction work needed? 

A:  It’s complicated. Pavement condition drops very quickly if routine preventative maintenance (crack seal, level up and seal coat) is not applied at the proper interval.

As illustrated by the sharp decline in the curve on the graph above at approximately the 10 year pavement life, when the PCI gets to a “critical point” which is typically around a PCI of 75, if sealcoat is not applied (and if crack seal and level up has not been done) the condition of the pavement declines rapidly beyond where preventative maintenance is no longer effective and more intensive and costly reactive maintenance or “rehabilitation” (mill and overlay, partial reconstruction and remove and replace) is needed.

It’s very easy to see from the COSA map that you provided to me that 1) The City has not had an adequate routine maintenance program for quite some time and 2) The dollars that have been spent on pavement maintenance in the last 10 years or so have been almost completely wasted. It would be interesting to see what the map looked like 10-15 years ago.