An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This is our view of funding for local streets and roads.
MTC’s Pavement Management Technical Assistance Program, or P-TAP for short, uses federal dollars to help our cities and counties stretch their budgets by:
- Implementing, updating and maintaining pavement management databases
- Providing accurate pavement condition data to city councils, county supervisors or other local decision makers
- Providing engineering design assistance for pavement rehabilitation projects
- Supporting our region’s management of non-pavement street and road assets such as signs, storm drains, curbs and gutters, traffic signals and street lights
MTC has dedicated about $1.5 million of federal money annually for P-TAP grants through fiscal 2015-16.
We issue a call for projects every fall. All Bay Area cities, counties and other public agencies within our region in charge of maintaining streets and roads are eligible to apply for P-TAP funds.
The local streets and roads owned and maintained by the Bay Area’s nine counties and 101 cities include nearly 43,000 lane-miles of pavement.
Add curbs and gutters, sidewalks, storm drains, traffic signs, signals and lights—which are all needed to keep our roadways functioning.
To replace this network would cost something on the order of $40 billion or more.
Heavy vehicles such as trucks and buses put far more stress on pavement than does a passenger car.
A bus exerts more than 7,000 times the stress than does a typical sports utility vehicle. And a garbage truck exerts more than 9,000 times as much stress as an SUV.
Not surprisingly, cracks appear more quickly on streets with large traffic volumes and/or heavy use by trucks and buses.
