Report on roads left by wayside

Nearly eight years ago a national pavement consultant gave Hawaii’s Department of Transportation recommendations to help improve the condition of its crumbling roads — but the consultant’s report was largely disregarded, and DOT leaders say they’ve only recently begun to enact some of the steps he suggested.

The 2008 report, “Pavement Preservation Technical Appraisal, Hawaii Executive Summary,” found among other problems that the state agency was using outdated software — an Excel spreadsheet — to keep track of pavement conditions on its roads. Its staff further lacked sufficient training, guidelines and tools to keep the roads in as good a shape as roads in other U.S. regions, the report found.

Larry Galehouse, director of the Michigan State University-based National Center for Pavement Preservation, issued the federally funded report to the state DOT in September 2008 after having met with various agency workers in Hawaii earlier that year.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser obtained the report from the Federal Highway Administration after requests to get it from state officials earlier this month went unanswered.

Despite the report’s years-old suggestion to upgrade its pavement management system, the DOT still uses the electronic spreadsheet, DOT Highways Division Deputy Director Edwin Sniffen said in an interview Monday.

“The scope and complexity of managing a large highway network require a more sophisticated system,” the 2008 report stated.

The state agency did recently purchase better pavement-management software called PAVER that should help staff better track the condition of the local roads and manage treatments to preserve their smooth surface, Sniffen said. The agency aims to replace its spreadsheet with PAVER in 2017, he added.

As the public outcry over the shoddy condition of Hawaii’s roads has grown, the DOT under Gov. David Ige has made upkeep of the state roads and highways a bigger priority than it was under his predecessors, according to DOT Director Ford Fuchigami.

Currently, about 80 percent of all new dollars in the DOT budget go toward preserving existing roadways, with the remaining 20 percent going to “capacity upgrades” — construction projects such as building new roadways or widening existing ones, Fuchigami said Monday. Under previous administrations the allocation was more of a 50-50 split, he added.

Even with that shift in priorities, DOT has a long way to go before the overall quality of state roadways improves, Fuchigami and Sniffen acknowledged. The agency does not use crack seal (stripes of rubbery sealant that trace a crack) or slurry seal (emulsion that coats the entire road surface) to treat Oahu’s state roads, including the H-1, H-2 and H-3 freeways, according to Sniffen. (The DOT did apply a polyester sealant to a concrete stretch of the H-1 airport viaduct in early 2015.)

Such materials have been used for decades in some other parts of the country, according to pavement industry experts. There are more than 1,150 lane miles of state-owned roads on Oahu and 2,500 such lane miles across the state, according to the DOT.

The agency does use crack and slurry seals on some neighbor island roadways to help keep roads smoother for a longer time between repavings, Sniffen said. The DOT plans to use more of those treatments in the future, including on Oahu to help extend the life of the H-1 roadway downtown, which the agency resurfaced in 2014, he added.

In 2008 DOT staff on Oahu “told us that pavement preservation treatments had not been used on Interstate highways due to the perceived risks of trying treatments for the first time,” Galehouse’s report stated.

The report recommended that then-DOT staffer Loy Kua be appointed a “champion” of the agency’s drive to keep its roads in better shape. Kuo “had a strong understanding and desire” for the task and would “serve the Department well in leading a combined initiative to expand the uses and capabilities of a new system,” it stated.

However, online records show that Kuo left the DOT months after the report’s release — in March 2009. He now works as a civil engineer in the city Department of Environmental Services. He declined to be interviewed.

Several DOT staff members who participated in the 2008 report remain in key management and engineering roles there. Sniffen said Monday that they would have been powerless to put the report’s tips into practice without an OK from DOT directors. Sniffen, who became deputy director in 2015, declined to speculate on decisions under prior leadership.

Sniffen did add that in the late 2000s there was a push by leaders in Hawaii and across the U.S. for more road construction projects, instead of a push to preserve existing roadways. Sniffen served in 2011 as the DOT’s Highways Division administrator before returning as deputy director in 2015. He wasn’t involved in pavement preservation issues during his first tenure at the DOT, he said Monday.

Fuchigami also served as the DOT’s Airports Division deputy director before leading the Highways Division.

The 2008 report further noted that the DOT didn’t have statewide guidelines to decide which roads should get preservation treatments first, and that the agency’s offices across the islands were using their own criteria. Sniffen said that after he became deputy the agency appointed a staff member in the Materials Testing and Research Branch to oversee pavement preservation across the state.

The agency is still developing long-term goals and strategies to improve the overall condition of the islands’ state roads for local drivers, Fuchigami added Monday.

Federal transportation officials were unable to track down by Monday how much the 2008 report cost.

HI Executive Summary