Everything you need to know about Oklahoma City's potholes and how streets get fixed

Of all the services Oklahoma City provides its residents, street maintenance and road conditions consistently receive the most complaints.

This year, the results of the city's resident satisfaction survey showed nothing different. Just 15% of Oklahoma City residents surveyed said they were satisfied with the condition of city streets.

This is a slight increase from the 12% of residents who said they were satisfied with city streets in 2021, but a decrease from 18% in 2020. Satisfaction in 2018 and 2019 was 11%. However, satisfaction with streets has been trending upward since 2016, when 8% of respondents were satisfied with streets.

After seeing this year's survey results, The Oklahoman sought to answer some of the most basic questions residents might have when it comes to the city's streets and especially potholes.

Are street conditions worse in Oklahoma City than other cities?

Almost as often as residents complain, city employees and elected officials remind them that fixing streets and filling potholes isn't a glamorous or easy undertaking for a city of 621 square miles.

Bad street conditions are not a result of corruption or incompetence, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt told The Oklahoman in August.

As the 10th-largest city in all of the United States by geographical size — or third, behind Jacksonville, Florida, and Houston, when you exclude sparsely populated yet expansive municipalities in Alaska, Montana and Kansas — Holt said Oklahoma City has "way more city streets than everybody else, and yet we don't have more people to fund their maintenance."

Specifically, the city maintains 3,500 miles of road, which is like driving from OKC to Anchorage, Alaska, according to an informational video made by the city. This number gets even higher when you account for each road's multiple lanes, calculating to about 8,000 "lane miles" the city is responsible for.

"When people come to me with concerns and disappointment about city streets, or the services that we provide border to border ... I have sensed time and again, that they don't realize that Oklahoma City is not like other cities," Holt said.

How many potholes does Oklahoma City fix every year?

But improving conditions are evident in the number of potholes the city fills each year, which in 2015 was over 100,000.

Since 2017, the number of pothole repairs has varied between 52,000 and 66,000.

In the past eight years, the condition of city streets has improved from a citywide average of 63 out of 100 on the pavement condition index in 2014, to soon reaching 71, Holt said at his State of the City address.

This is largely due to newly paved roads funded through the 2017 Better Streets, Safer City bond program. In 2017, the city resurfaced only 40 miles of roads. That number reached a high of 137 miles in 2020, and has hovered around 100 miles for the past two years.

How do Oklahoma City workers know where potholes are?

Because the city doesn't have the staffing or resources to drive around every day looking for potholes, the only way a crew will be sent to fix one is if someone submits a report to the action center.

The city provides a variety of ways this can be done: through an online form, through the OKC Connect app, emailing action.center@okc.gov, calling 405-297-2535 or texting 405-252-1053.

Who decides when potholes get fixed?

The Public Works department has 13 crews dedicated specifically to filling potholes daily, Director Eric Wenger said. But with so much ground to cover, requests are fulfilled based on a prioritization system.

"We will break the city into quadrants and assign teams in areas to address the greatest needs first," Wenger said.

The potholes that get fixed first are those found on more heavily trafficked streets.

Do some areas of Oklahoma City get more potholes than others?

Drivers often perceive their neighborhood or the common streets they drive as being worse than others.

Though the city was unable to provide The Oklahoman with locations where it fills potholes most often — something Public Works spokeswoman Shannon Cox said is "just not tracked" — heavy dissatisfaction with streets was consistent across the city's wards and ZIP codes in the resident survey.

Respondents living in Oklahoma City's southwestern 3rd Ward were the most unhappy, with just 7% saying they were satisfied with streets. The highest satisfaction levels hovered around 20% in Wards 1, 5 and 7.

The further out a street is from being repaved, the more conditions deteriorate and potholes become more likely to occur. A map of street resurfacing projects planned, underway or completed under Better Streets, Safer City can be seen at okc.gov.

How much does it cost to fix a pothole?

Another unanswered question is how much it costs the city to fix a single pothole.

Cox said this varies too much to put a number on, as it depends on the size and extent of damage.

But it is known that to resurface one lane mile, which would be one lane's worth of a mile of road, it costs the city between $350,000 to $400,000. To resurface one mile of a four-lane road costs about $1.4 to $1.6 million.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: 6 questions about OKC potholes and streets answered