Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell will announce today a sweeping plan to fix and repave all city roads needing repair in the next five years.
ROAD REPAIR DATABASE
View our searchable database of the 3,000 O’ahu road segments scheduled to be repaired over the next five years.
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Caldwell will discuss the goal during a 1 p.m. news conference at a road construction site on Kewalo Street near Wilder Avenue. His five-year plan calls on work crews to repave several thousand street segments worn down by the island’s wet weather and strained with heavy traffic. In 2013 it aims to repave about 290 lane-miles of road. Some 310 lane-miles would be repaved in 2014 and again in 2015.
The move follows years of road repair neglect across Oahu, where city and state officials have often failed to keep pace with routine maintenance and have only recently started making pushes to catch up. Potholes and cracks still mar the island’s streets and highways — forcing local drivers to spend hundreds of dollars more in annual vehicle repairs than they would have on smooth roads, according to national estimates.
As part of Caldwell’s goal, his office today released two lengthy lists of streets so degraded that they’ve been deemed "unsatisfactory" by city officials. One list details more than 3,000 road segments slated for repaving in the next five years, and the other has more than 760 segments where a roadwork project is already under way.
Those lists don’t include streets that require less costly "slurry-seal" work, Caldwell spokesman Jesse Broder Van Dyke said. Slurry-seal work involves repairing the top surface of a street to extend its life. The city aims to slurry-seal 60 lane-miles of road a year, Van Dyke said.
The lists also don’t include state-operated highways, which are some of the most severely damaged roadways on Oahu. However, state transportation officials say they are also working on more than $170 million in repairs to the H-1; Kamehameha, Farrington and Pali highways; and other major state roads.
Caldwell promised to make fixing potholes a priority during his campaign for mayor last year. In January he helped patch potholes on Gulick Avenue to underscore that promise.
Still, exactly how Caldwell’s administration plans to carry out his five-year goal remains unclear.
The city is spending about $23 million more this year than last on road maintenance — boosting its budget of $77 million on roadwork in fiscal year 2012 to about $100 million in fiscal year 2013, according to new Department of Facility Maintenance Director Ross Sasamura. That department, along with the Department of Design and Construction, handles road maintenance and repair for Honolulu.
Earlier this month Sasamura said he wasn’t sure how many more lane-miles could be fixed with that added cash because he was "not sure of all the issues we’re going to have to address."
When roadwork has been put off for too long, "there may be added work that’s required," and city officials are still determining the scope of those repairs, Sasamura said. City officials say it costs about $50,000 to slurry-seal a lane-mile of road, compared with $250,000 to repave a lane-mile.
Sasamura and Department of Design and Construction Director Chris Takashige are slated to join Caldwell at the news conference today.
Last year the city established a road-paving policy, which it described as "long overdue," that set standards for road repairs. It called on crews to better maintain roads already in good condition to avoid more expensive repair costs later.
The city maintains more than 3,500 lane-miles of road. A survey last fall found nearly 57 percent of Oahu city roads were in "good" or "adequate" condition, while nearly 16 percent were in "degraded" condition and nearly 28 percent fell in the worst category, "unsatisfactory" condition.
