As Sacramento’s roads crumble, our addiction to car culture worsens climate change | Opinion

Sacramento County Supervisors Rich Desmond and Pat Hume want to fix your roads.

It’s obvious why the two have decided to tackle the issue together: Out of the five Sacramento county supervisors, Desmond and Hume represent the most constituents living in the unincorporated county, where there are no city or town councils for residents to attend. Municipal concerns fall directly to them as the next-highest governmental authority in the area.

“Counties were never established to do a good job to provide those municipal services,” Desmond said Tuesday evening at the Rancho Cordova Public Library, where he and Hume listened to locals talk about the state of the roads and the two made a plea for voters’ support for the money to fix them. “The county has got to be more attentive.”

Opinion

Sacramento County’s “Pavement Condition Index” — how we measure the health of local roads — is currently at an embarrassingly low average of 48 out of 100, placing us firmly in the “Poor” category. The worse the roads are, the more damage it causes to vehicles, at a cost that gets passed down to taxpayers either way.

Not surprisingly, Sacramento County compares poorly with the rest of the state. A statewide sampling found that Sacramento is only ahead of counties like Lake and Mendocino, which have significantly smaller populations and tighter general budgets. And the worse our roads get, the harder it is to repair them, Sacramento County Department of Transportation Director, Ron Vicari told the crowd.

“They’re not wrong that the road conditions in Sacramento, all over the county, are bad,” Sam Rice told me. “(But) roads degrade, that’s what they do.”

Rice is the transportation team lead for the Environmental Council of Sacramento and sits on the board for the Sacramento Metro Advocates for Rail and Transit, where he advises the city of Sacramento and other communities on how the future of transportation can co-exist with smart climate policy.

“Road investment in the past has always been something that we simply did out of habit and it’s something that I feel, in the future, we should be thinking of in the context of complete streets,” Rice said. “If we’re going to invest in roads, how are we going to offset those goals with our goals for (the environment)?”

But whether it’s a repair or a total overhaul, the cost of road maintenance always gets passed onto taxpayers, usually in the form of a tax increase. Last year, Hume and many of his contributors supported Measure A, a sales tax increase scheme that was rejected by county voters.

Proponents of Measure A said it would have raised $8.5 billion over 40 years for transportation and road improvement projects but would have done so by doubling the county’s transportation tax and making gasoline even more expensive. Measure A looked suspiciously like a similar 2016 sales tax measure that was also narrowly defeated, but the new measure was bankrolled by wealthy special interests like the Cordova Hills Development Corp. so that taxpayers would be on the hook for new roads leading out to their leapfrog development projects in — you guessed it — Hume’s new district.

Major road repair backlog

But let’s say that money would have gone to roads that actually need repair: According to Vicari’s data, the county is currently budgeting about $60 million per year for road maintenance projects, but that number fluctuates with whatever financial assistance the department can glean from funders like the Sacramento Area Council of Governments. The county needs approximately $800 million to repair the county’s roads just as they are right now. By the time our roads reach the “very poor” categorization status in just a few years, it will take what engineers call “a full-depth reclamation” to repair the roads — at four times the cost of the number of overlay projects we needed this year.

Deferring that road maintenance will place the county in an approximate $1.3 billion deficit over the next 20 years.

But, as one attendee at Tuesday’s meeting so succinctly put it: “We like our cars and we want our roads fixed.”

It’s true, we do like our cars in California, where we lead the nation (along with Texas and Florida) for most cars per capita. And most of the honey/money pots for projects across the state are awarded to sustainable, multi-modal, “complete street” refurbishments that emphasize pedestrian and bicycle use in conjunction with personal vehicles — not reconstructing old roads with a slurry seal and a hasty prayer that it’ll hold for another 10 years.

But we already know that continuing to rely on personal cars is a problem; not only are they gas-guzzlers, but increased car traffic drastically adds to the production of greenhouse gasses, further exacerbating climate change and environmental disasters like the wildfires damaging so many communities every year.

We’re effectively throwing good money after bad, and increasing our community’s reliance on oil, gas and cars in a textbook case of a sunk-cost fallacy.

At the meeting on Tuesday, Desmond and Hume implied SACOG (the Sacramento Area Coalition of Governments) will only fund idealistic transportation projects like “complete streets” — but isn’t that exactly what they should be doing? It was fascinating to watch Desmond and Hume quietly position SACOG as the villain of the meeting, as though they don’t both sit on the board.

It’s become increasingly clear that Sacramento County can’t afford to keep patching roads that only serve one mode of transportation, and we’re never going to find money for projects that don’t take environmental concerns into consideration. But neither can we allow the poorest, most underrepresented parts of our county to pay for maintenance while cities like Sacramento, Elk Grove, Folsom and Rancho Cordova all sit pretty in the “fair” “good” or even “excellent” categories of the Pavement Condition Index.

A possible solution

Perhaps Sacramento County ought to commit to a one-time, major investment in repairing its county roads. Cobble together every piece of funding from federal, statewide and local programs that it can get its hands on and maybe, too, look expectantly at some of the wealthy land developers who seek only to add to the transportation problems we currently face. Developers will only pay what’s legally required of them, so let’s figure out a way to tap into those deep pockets. if they want to add more traffic and greenhouse gases to our community, then they need to pay for the privilege.

Improve the roads in unincorporated county communities now to give us a runway — or a roadway, if you will — into the future, and commit that intervening time period before they start to crumble again to figuring out how Sacramento County (and the whole of California, really) will solve the problems our dependence on car culture creates.

We may “like our cars,” but as Rice pointed out: “We can no longer simply look at these things as something we’re going to do in perpetuity. We have to be thinking about the investment.”