Who decides which roads to repair first?

You’ve heard the old expression, “Looks like nine miles of bad road,” which refers to someone who is not looking his or her best at the moment.

Well, judging from some of the phone calls and emails I get, there are more than 9 miles of bad road in Columbus. That hardly makes the city unique. Roads are not meant to be permanent, and they take a heck of a beating. Heat, cold, rain, ice and snow. Millions of pounds of vehicles rolling over them, some of those vehicles 18-wheelers, cement trucks, garbage trucks, etc. It’s a miracle they last as long as they do.

So as you can imagine, I get a lot of calls about people wondering why the city hasn’t repaired, resurfaced or even replaced their road. So I called my friend Farhad AliFarhani, an engineer with the city government who is in charge of such things, and I asked how the city determines which roads get what treatment.

It’s actually a pretty scientific process that has had the politics squeezed out of it as much as possible, AliFarhani said. He said the most common complaint from people on the southside is that all the paving money is spent up north, and vice versa, he said.

Every five years or so, a company from Minnesota comes down and drives every mile of road in the county in trucks equipped with cameras and other equipment. They feed all the pictures and other information into a computer program they developed just for this and it rates the roads, in segments, on something called the PCI, or Pavement Condition Index.

Roads are rated on a 1-100 scale, with 100 being a brand new road in perfect condition and a 1 being probably barely passable. The program spits the list out and that is the order in which the Engineering Department repairs and roads, AliFarhani said.

Actually, the Engineering Department doesn’t repair roads. They hire that out to professional paving contractors. (For minor repairs such as small sections or simple potholes, the city’s Public Works has a crew to handle that.) But the big jobs go to the pros.

Roads can be repaired in varying degrees.

If it’s just cracked but still in pretty good shape, they’ll pour a sealant into the cracks to keep water from seeping down into the street and accelerating the deterioration. You’ve all seen those streets. In addition to being ugly, they are not popular with motorcyclists or bicyclists because they can be slick in wet weather. Tar worms, or tar snakes, the cyclists call them.

Other roads need a new surface laid down on them, AliFarhani said. On those roads, a fresh layer of blacktop, about an inch and a half, is laid down over the old one and fresh paint is put down.

If that’s been done a few times, the road will need to be ground down to near the road base and fresh blacktop put down over that. That’s more expensive, but you can only pile so many layers of asphalt down on one road.

Finally, if the road and its base is totally shot, it will have to be totally ripped out and started over. That, of course, is the most expensive and time-consuming process.

The process is very technical, but not political, AliFarhani said. For the most part, they go by the list provided by the analysts. Now and then, something might happen to a road in the five years between assessments and it will be moved up the list, but that’s not the norm, he said.

So if the road you live on, or one you drive often on, needs work, rest assured that it’s on the list. You just don’t know where.

And remember, there are about 1,000 miles of road in Columbus, and the city only has money to resurface about 15-20 miles a year, AliFarhani said. So 9 miles of bad road doesn’t seem so bad after all.

This story was originally published October 9, 2016 at 5:32 PM with the headline "Who decides which roads to repair first?."