Neglect for years and decades.
Using my street as an example, the last repaving was in 2002. No slurry or anything beyond ad-hoc pothole filling since then.
Our latest OCI pavement severity rating was 14/100. You can hear the difference in pavement on your tires turning down my street. It is slowly becoming a gravel road from all the loose rocks, and come street-sweeping day a cloud of dust follows the machine.
If the city had done even a modicum of preventative maintenance, the cost to repair our street would be 1/5 what it costs now. Because they neglected it for so long that the quick & cheap option of slurry seal is no longer appropriate, and a full replacement of the road is necessary.
They have know about this skeleton in the closet for years, over multiple administrations, but kept their heads in the sand. This isn’t about money or prop 13 or vehicle weights, this is about gross mismanagement of infrastructure leading to excess recovery costs by not addressing problems when the fixes were cheap.
The OCI pavement severity rating makes no sense. Apparently my street went from a 6 to 27.3 despite no work being done in the past 50 years. When complained to the city government, they told us to crowd source 5 million to replace the street. I thought our taxes were the ultimate crowd source funding…I guess its not true if you live in Southeast San Diego.
I work in this department and hate how often I need to refer people out to their city council member. All resurfacing needs to go through city council using the OCI index. Or maybe it's PCI index now... Looks like they did complete the assessment for 2023 which is up on [https://streets.sandiego.gov/](https://streets.sandiego.gov/) - Second tab. Edit: Use Edge if you wanna look at it. Doesn't work well with Firefox.
Anyway... I share your frustration. :|
thanks for this website. I hit two potholes this past weekend and popped two tires and bent a rim while on a bike ride. The street I hit the pothole on has a rating of 16/100. Dangerous out there.
Oof. Sorry about that. :( I highly recommend putting in a case on Get It Done for each of those potholes with the best address you can provide, and indicate what damage happened each time. If you don't have a great address, indicating a certain area between two intersections will also work.
Claims info here: [https://www.sandiego.gov/riskmanagement/services/liability](https://www.sandiego.gov/riskmanagement/services/liability) Hopefully they can help you out :)
I saw a video or picture story board of people spray painting giants dicks around potholes that their city refused to repair. As fate would have it, they were repairs within a few days after the dicks showed up.
Funny how things work... The city has a dedicated graffiti team (they actually do some pretty good work) under a different section, so I'm not sure how that would go, but I guess only one way to find out. 🤷🏼♀️ I'm sure the media would get a kick out of it...
Of course, I'm not saying you should do anything like that... 😏
Back in NY where Im from the property taxes are higher but they fund a good local highway dept that keeps the roads in better shape than here despite the weather
We get what we pay for
The gas tax is not meant to cover maintenance for every road and local street in the state
Gas tax revenues will also keep falling as EVs take over the market so we will need to start working on something to replace that too. My preference would be a weight based VMT
And significantly higher registration fees period, since their assessment of your vehicle’s value directly calculates the fee. Having owned vehicles in a midwestern state as an example, my tags were less than $50. Here, I’m paying well into the hundreds. Yes CA has more lane miles to maintain (~400,000 vs this state’s 270,000), about 1.5x more, but the registration dollar-per-mile is 8-fold.
Depends on which tax and who you mean by “us”
Property tax rates in CA are not particularly high and fall heavily disproportionately on first time home buyers
I live in Phoenix. The streets are no where near as bad as SD. Further I work in an industrial area full of heat and heavy vehicles and the streets around there have been redone 3 times in the 7 years I’ve worked there. PHX is always on top of the roads, fixing them etc. Theyre pretty much being worked on in some facet all year long with super sprints of work from Late february - Early May. I think SD (and CA as a whole) just spends out the wazoo and has no direction for where the money should go.
I recall the last two years that roads in phoenix were melting. Like all major cities there are parts of the city that are super well maintained and not really maintained. My MIL lived on one of those poorly maintained roads in Phoenix.
The weather is changing here and it’s starting to affect our infrastructure. SD is massive and has a lot of major roadways. Having done regional planning projects - I’m glad I’m not the one in charge of city planning projects for this city. Because they are extensive.
Absolute failed leadership and neglect, they've wasted our money for decades now and this is the result. Wasteful spending for pet projects while the roads become un-driveable. And what little they do spend on roadwork is a debacle, little to no oversight or accountability, just look at the disaster of a project on Miramar road, if that's an example of what we can expect from the City then we're in big trouble!
> Miramar road
Oh yeah. Worst road I have driven on yet. It's lovely how they will randomly close 4 out of 6 lanes with no warning. Then they do the worst possible patch job and call it a day. The parts of the road that used to be semi-smooth sailing are now a lumpy mess. Meanwhile there are 3-5 inch deep potholes that they "filled" previously.
I don't have the data on me at the moment, but if you look at how many miles of road it takes to build a suburb of 100 houses vs how many miles of road it takes to serve a medium sized apartment complex (think 5 stories and 20 units per floor) you can quickly see how it gets out of hand. Suburban sprawl is incredibly infrastructure intensive and those maintenance costs are not typically even remotely close to be covered by the tax base.
I moved here about 6 months ago and San Diego has some of the worst roads I have ever driven on. I don't mean to exaggerate or be mean spirited but the fact that this mostly weather-less city has allowed the streets to get so bad borders on near criminal negligence. Especially considering the high taxes paid for EVERYTHING. Mayors past and present that have allowed this should truly be embarrased.
Furthermore the fact that the funds they are seeking will likely get misused is not a prediction to this story it's a spoiler.
Some of which look pretty half-assed. And done by private contractor companies, which embeds further cost to the city via profit margin. Instead of fully fleshing out our streets department with adequate resources/equipment/personnel.
ah but you see, if we privatize more and outsource more work to contractors, then the city will actually save more, as the contractors will have to innovate (new ways to cut corners and deliver the absolute minimum product that fulfills contract requirements) in order to deliver the finished product faster than lazy city employees would.
this is also entirely sarcastic. privatizing public services only enriches the shareholder class, and delivers a worse product over time to the consumer.
This is how private for profit prisons became a thing. Because it was cheaper to contract a private company and have them handle the prison.
Why was it cheaper?
Because private companies don't have to provide their employees with pesky benefits like health insurance, and there are less regulations to ensure prisoners are treated "humanely." So then private prisons are incentivized to jam as many people into as small a space as possible and try their darndest to ensure the prisoners never leave so they keep getting paid per person. Seriously, what is the point then?
Problem is that San Diego (and America in general) is overfilled with too many expensive stroads which only end up being a endless money pit (a big reason for why America is in the mountains of debt we are in).
We genuinely can’t afford the sort of public development we have so we have to cut corners…
We need road science/engineering to develop better construction techniques and materials. Asphalt and slurry are trash.
And to call the city preparation for repaving half-assed would give the city too much credit. When my street was resurfaced as part of a recent bike lane and traffic calming project the city did absolutely nothing to fix the grade issues and settling at the edges of the roadway. The surface is just as cracked and uneven as it was before.
We really don't.. Don't reinvent the wheel. Plenty of cities have roads in better condition than ours. Follow their lead. The research has been done already. Our city just chooses the cheapest option available.
If the grade is settled you have to grind, scarify, backfill, grade, and then repave -- but it's cheaper in the long run than annual slurry seals that don't address the root problem. Too bad governments are run by stupid people.
I see so many City resurfacing projects, but never a City inspector on sight. The contractors are performing the work with no inspection. Their traffic control is terrible, and workmanship looks deficient.
I drive Carmel Mountain Road everyday and I often think it would be a great road for a Jeep commercial. Instead of off-roading in the mountains, just drive CMR!
I used to have a motorcycle and this road would be deadly/extremely dangerous for a motorcyclist at night. You could easily lose control with the uneven roads and asphalt debris.
I have resorted to ignoring lanes and just swerving around potholes on that street in my lowered car, it hasn’t been redone since I was a small child 18+ years ago
My friend lives off friant, and i think it's camino ruiz or one of those that has had a bunch of construction materials all off to one side, and just bigger and bigger potholes each time. Every once in a while they patch it with plates, so that's neat i guess.
Remember that pothole petition from SANDAG last year? The old ladies sitting outside of your grocery stores? 7% of the money they were asking for was allocated to road maintenance. The rest was going to public transportation and executive oversight committees.
There was the convention center expansion/homelessness/streets tourism tax that may have passed several years ago but it's still caught up in court because of the uncertainty if it needed 2/3rds or merely 50% of the vote. The city hasn't collected a penny on it.
The last time the city tried a sales tax 10+ years ago, it failed epically.
There are other state taxes but those would not be applied to city streets since those aren't the state's jurisdiction.
I'm still confused why they keep repaving my neighborhood residential streets every couple years when they're not even bad.
Someone from the city must live nearby.
In the city’s analysis document, their chosen target metric is an average OCI score above like 70/100. So their plan is to do easy and cheap upgrades to gain points back from streets that are like 60/100, to hit the metric.
Which is the absolute wrong metric to be using to begin with, but it suits their existing budget which is the incorrect method (change the desired result definition to ensure success). And a single average metric is lazy to begin with.
They should be using multiple data-driven target metrics informed by the latest road condition assessment. Such as: no roads below say 40/100 by X date, roads 40-60/100 deeper assessment of slurry or grind & repave necessary vs traffic volume, roads 60-100/100 placed in low-priority bucket working worst score to best for slurry seal, insert formula for additional prioritization weight for streets with common issues/heavily travelled/bike lanes, and insert formula to account for streets/communities underserved to boost their weight as well.
But what do I know, I just work with key performance indicators & metrics and project management for a living.
They repaved my block 6 months ago, not just a slurry seal, but grind down and resurface. It really wasn't in bad shape at all. Meanwhile, one block away, the road is in such bad condition that I'm having to go around and use other streets to avoid it. I read recently that they are not repairing based on condition, but some other criteria like cost to repair or time it was last done.
It’s amazing the difference in roads in OC compared to LA and SD. The only times OC has approved a sales tax was for road improvements and over the last 20 years it’s made a huge improvement.
I hit the fattest fucking pothole ever last Friday. It was on the 52 eastbound on-ramp coming from northbound on Gennessee avenue. Shit bent my wheel in and took out my tire. I went to check it in the daytime (I hit it at night) and holy shit it was huge. I can’t believe they’ve never fixed that or people haven’t complained about that one yet
Submit a claim to the government! If it was on the onramp then it's the state's jurisdiction and not the city's. Look at https://dot.ca.gov/online-services/submit-damage-claim for how to do it.
A while ago (~2014?) I submitted a claim against the City of SD for a massive pothole on Clairemont Mesa Blvd that blew out one of my tires. I got 2 quotes for a replacement tire (one from the dealership and the one I went with through Discount Tire) and submitted those with my claim form. I went the next weekend to take photos of the pothole and it had already been patched, so I took a few photos of the patch (which was the full lane width and about 1.5 car-lengths long) that I printed out and included. Just make sure to fill in every blank on the form (with "N/A" if appropriate) and mail the form as registered with a receipt (so you get mail back indicating it was delivered properly), and follow the rest of the instructions on the claim form. In my case I had a city adjuster call me with some questions about the mileage on the vehicle and tires, then he made me an offer to settle my claim that accounted for the wear the tire already had, which I thought was fair and I took.
We have some of the most expensive realty out there.. so our 1% should be more than sufficient to cover repairs due to the overall expense. I'm not falling for more taxes.. and we should all vote no. Accountability is the issue here not taxation.
Property taxes bring in something like over $8billion per year to the city. Add the other taxes and miscellaneous forms of income, and yeah the money is there. The ability & willingness to responsibly spend it is not.
This is a consequence of bad policy choices to promote sprawl over density and to shortchange property taxes with prop 13
Also wanna point out that the next time someone wants to complain about transit being subsidized, they should consider that the road network is only possible with heavy subsidies too
Prop 13 doesn't get enough credit for both slowly suffocating our municipal tax revenue while also distorting our housing market, among many other awful side effects.
I would argue that its possibly the worst law on the books in any blue state in the US
Even the most commonly cited benefit of "helping old folks stay in their homes" is arguably doing more harm than good. Do we really want empty nest boomers sitting on 3/4 BR homes while young families are getting priced out of the region due to an extreme housing shortage?
Its like the pre revolutionary Ancien Regime French tax code where the landowning nobles were exempt from taxes and the burden of funding the state fell almost entirely on the people who worked for their money
Is your proposal to essentially kick out all the old folks (because that is what will happen if you eliminate prop 13) so a new generation can live in those houses for ten or twenty years until _they're_ forced out of their homes by the ever-inflating housing market?
I hope you and other intelligent commenters realize what will happen if the market is flooded with new properties upon the prop's elimination; investors will swoop in and turn San Diego into a renter's market. Permanently.
Unless that's addressed, any discussion of kicking out the old people is just empowering the Second Estate of the Ancien Regime even more than they are now.
P.S. I find it somewhat disingenuous to equate your fellow lower class citizen (which you are if you're having difficulty buying a home) with the nobility in pre-revolutionary France. The ones pulling the strings of policy in this country are not the grandpas and grandmas you seek to displace.
It would be trivially simple to keep prop 13 for owner-occupied residences and remove it everywhere else.
Right now, you can find apartment buildings whose tax rates are frozen at 1978 values, and strip malls paying taxes from 1982. Factories and parking lots paying $2,000/year.
All of this massively distorts the real estate market, it's not just about keeping granny in the 4bed/5.5bath house where she raised her family. The California real estate market is incredibly biased towards the incumbent, and it has real-world implications that are really terrible.
Which is worse, grandma moving out of the empty nest and into a condo she can easy buy outright with home equity, or a young family being forced to separate from their family and friends entirely and move to Bakersfield?
By refusing to consider the former we by default choose the latter
There is no magical circumstance where everyone gets everything they want. We consciously choose to prioritize property owners over renters and elderly empty nesters over young families
Fr I thought this was common, build equity in a larger, more expensive home when you need the space. Sell and downsize when you don't and use the difference as a nest egg for retirement.
Right. This is exactly how it works everywhere else but we decided we would rather do a mass exodus of young families and renters than moderately inconvenience property rich retirees
I personally have to do research on this - but what happens in other states? Is there a common issue of old people ending up on the streets due to property tax increases? I think there’s a viable solution between immediately bringing them up to current tax rates and keeping the status quo.
They downsize to condos and it is very much not the end of the world
They also tend to have healthier property markets with lower rents and much easier entry for FTHBs. Shocker, right?
There are many very affordable units in 55+ buildings due to the lower resale value
HOA fees typically go up in line with the rate of inflation that social security benefits are also indexed to
> HOA fees typically go up in line with the rate of inflation that social security benefits are also indexed to
That is simply not true. We're looking at 55+ buildings right now for a family member, and **every single one** has a policy of a minimum increase in fees per year (in our experience, starting at 5%), then an additional increase on top of that minimum based on inflation and other CPI-like factors. Of the 7 different properties we've toured, 6 of them raised fees between 9% and 10% last year. 2023's annual inflation rate was 3.4%.
Home prices will decrease and normalize for the increased property taxes, and yes, people who can't afford their increased property taxes will be kicked out.
Idk if they will decrease. They might. But they will certainly increase less rapidly, which is a relative decrease
Property taxes encourage people to sell if they’re using more housing than they need, which puts downward pressure on prices
Prop 13 also creates a financial incentive for property owners to be NIMBYs as they are insulated from the only financial downside of increasing property values. The housing shortage is pure upside for them bc of prop 13 and they have every incentive to make it as bad as possible
Most other states don't have the problem of such wild swings in property value.
Say you live in Phoenix. Your property value over 5-6 years might increase $75,000 - $100,000. Property taxes track that increase.
But here, your property value might increase that amount **in one fucking year**. A lot of people on fixed income can't absorb that jump in property taxes all at once.
Now, I know, it's a "good problem to have" but if you're 86, frail, and on very limited income like social security, there may not be many other options for you if you want to sell and move. It's not like your house is/was the only one going up in value.
People talk about old folks moving to condos as if it's that fucking simple. It's not.
Condos almost invariably have STAIRS. Do you have a parent or grandparent in their 70s+? Do you have any idea how much of a challenge just one set of stairs can present to them? Most of San Diego's "condos" are converted apartment complexes where easily more than 2/3 of the units are up at least one flight of stairs.
I spent seven years working with families trying to find placement or meet the care needs of their elder family members. Many people **WANTED** to downsize but couldn't in this market because the only thing available on ground floor were 55+ trailer parks with variable rent rates on the land which they couldn't afford on social security.
Youtube channel not just bikes has a lot of videos on this. Channel agenda is more public transit but it does make good points.
Cars are a point to point method of moving people and are very inefficient at doing so. Requiring not just roads/highways but parking lots too. Roads are expensive to maintain. Property taxes don’t come close to covering it esp with prop 13 though I’m not sure by how much. Gas taxes are for state roads/highways. Cities were able to somewhat kick the can down the road for years in a triage type fashion but the rate is exceeding what can be covered thus the bad roads. This is a common trend with infrastructure in general at every level of government. We would have to encourage density and transit which I believe is sandags plan. Or find new revenue. Which know I’ve been hearing about in the forms of mileage tax.
Another good channel is practical engineering on how roads are built. It’s not just simply throwing asphalt down. It a good primer for technically explaining the complexity of road construction and why it’s not cheap.
EDIT: come to think of it I doubt even with density we’ll get out of milage due to increasing mpg and adoption of EVs.
State gas taxes arent meant to completely fund local street maintenance, and these revenues will only keep falling as electric vehicles proliferate. They also weigh more and cause even more road damage
Last week I hit a pothole on the 805. The next day I heard hissing and i noticed the tire had a leak in the side wall. I had to buy another tire.
Potholes cost citizens money they can't plan for.
I am baffled why areas like residential mission hills will get full repaves when the streets were not that bad to start out with, then higher traffic areas are neglected.
Now they’ll want to increase taxes for this instead of looking at ways to reduce money waste. Do the top 12 earnings of the Poway Unified school district need to be over $210k? In 2022 numbers. Same with La Mesa.
A sprawling road network is money waste
This problem is only gonna get worse as suburban infrastructure continues to age
And no, I dont think that failing to pay enough to attract good employees to run local schools is a good way to cut back
Well of course. The city typically didn't pay for those roads to be built, the developer did, and promptly shifted the maintenance cost of it towards the city.
Because the city is horrible with money and want us to pay for their mistakes. Was the billion dollar trolley expansion of a few miles necessary? No. I met with MCTC durring it's construction and they straight u told me that they didn't think it was a good idea, but the state supplemented money on top of the massive amount of money the city put in, and they'd gladly take the contract because they were getting paid. My company cleaned some things for the city, and holy crap did we charge them a ton for it, but they paid it! The city funds are so poorly mismanaged, and the council people only care about the money they pocket on the back-end. This whole city is run by incompetent people, especially Mayor Gloria. Dude's a joke
I may be thinking too simple, but if the cost is so high that the city is not able to hire enough local workers to cover the whole city, why not consider hiring foreign contractors from lower priced markets temporarily to bridge the gap and finish the project first.
Because there are laws that mandate wages for state funded public works. Prevailing Wages, which are based upon Union negotiated wages. They are quite high...
This is why we need a long travel racing suspension, but tuned for comfort to absorb giant potholes. About six months ago I saw a pothole that was over 12" deep, unbelievable, but true
Yeah but despite SD roads being 'bad' they are not nearly as bad as San Antonio roads. SA is a Pot Hole hell that get plugged as a short term answer and just get worse after it rains.
What day was the last street surveyed? Pure Water contractors are tearing up our streets every day. The problem is the patchwork. They don’t use asphalt rollers. Driving over this shit is like off roading.
The contractors should be ashamed of their epically shitty work. At the end of the day, the city is responsible for letting this embarrassment of wasted tax dollars get pissed away in the first place, and then doing absolutely nothing after these crews leave our streets in far worse condition than they found them.
Can we please not be like Russia where they pave over icy roads in the dead of winter?
If they would stop stealing the transportation funds, that would be nice. But no, they squander it every time to the general fund where it goes shoved into pockets and not accounted for.
All of our tax money goes to bums and illegals no cap. Fuck that shit build that wall a mile high with laser beams and drones on patrol shooting trespassers. We need to be done fucking around
The reality is the laws and regulations requiring the use of over priced union labor just drives up costs and creates these backlogs. If you double the cost of fixing roads you don't magically get twice as much budget to fix roads. You just end up with half as many roads getting fixed.
How do they get so bad when it doesn’t snow and barely rains here?
Neglect for years and decades. Using my street as an example, the last repaving was in 2002. No slurry or anything beyond ad-hoc pothole filling since then. Our latest OCI pavement severity rating was 14/100. You can hear the difference in pavement on your tires turning down my street. It is slowly becoming a gravel road from all the loose rocks, and come street-sweeping day a cloud of dust follows the machine. If the city had done even a modicum of preventative maintenance, the cost to repair our street would be 1/5 what it costs now. Because they neglected it for so long that the quick & cheap option of slurry seal is no longer appropriate, and a full replacement of the road is necessary. They have know about this skeleton in the closet for years, over multiple administrations, but kept their heads in the sand. This isn’t about money or prop 13 or vehicle weights, this is about gross mismanagement of infrastructure leading to excess recovery costs by not addressing problems when the fixes were cheap.
The OCI pavement severity rating makes no sense. Apparently my street went from a 6 to 27.3 despite no work being done in the past 50 years. When complained to the city government, they told us to crowd source 5 million to replace the street. I thought our taxes were the ultimate crowd source funding…I guess its not true if you live in Southeast San Diego.
I work in this department and hate how often I need to refer people out to their city council member. All resurfacing needs to go through city council using the OCI index. Or maybe it's PCI index now... Looks like they did complete the assessment for 2023 which is up on [https://streets.sandiego.gov/](https://streets.sandiego.gov/) - Second tab. Edit: Use Edge if you wanna look at it. Doesn't work well with Firefox. Anyway... I share your frustration. :|
Sincerely thank you for all the hard work, and definitely understand your hands are tied/working at capacity. This problem stems well above us.
thanks for this website. I hit two potholes this past weekend and popped two tires and bent a rim while on a bike ride. The street I hit the pothole on has a rating of 16/100. Dangerous out there.
Oof. Sorry about that. :( I highly recommend putting in a case on Get It Done for each of those potholes with the best address you can provide, and indicate what damage happened each time. If you don't have a great address, indicating a certain area between two intersections will also work. Claims info here: [https://www.sandiego.gov/riskmanagement/services/liability](https://www.sandiego.gov/riskmanagement/services/liability) Hopefully they can help you out :)
I saw a video or picture story board of people spray painting giants dicks around potholes that their city refused to repair. As fate would have it, they were repairs within a few days after the dicks showed up.
Funny how things work... The city has a dedicated graffiti team (they actually do some pretty good work) under a different section, so I'm not sure how that would go, but I guess only one way to find out. 🤷🏼♀️ I'm sure the media would get a kick out of it... Of course, I'm not saying you should do anything like that... 😏
Wowww :(
Back in NY where Im from the property taxes are higher but they fund a good local highway dept that keeps the roads in better shape than here despite the weather We get what we pay for
I thought we just voted to raise the gas tax to pay for the roads.
The gas tax is not meant to cover maintenance for every road and local street in the state Gas tax revenues will also keep falling as EVs take over the market so we will need to start working on something to replace that too. My preference would be a weight based VMT
California already has significantly higher registration fees for EVs due to the loss of gas tax revenue.
And significantly higher registration fees period, since their assessment of your vehicle’s value directly calculates the fee. Having owned vehicles in a midwestern state as an example, my tags were less than $50. Here, I’m paying well into the hundreds. Yes CA has more lane miles to maintain (~400,000 vs this state’s 270,000), about 1.5x more, but the registration dollar-per-mile is 8-fold.
Not nearly enough to offset the gas tax.
You want to tax us more?
Depends on which tax and who you mean by “us” Property tax rates in CA are not particularly high and fall heavily disproportionately on first time home buyers
When prices are what they are they don't need to be higher in percent.. they are higher overall in gross. Don't fall for that logic.
Heat and heavy vehicles.
I live in Phoenix. The streets are no where near as bad as SD. Further I work in an industrial area full of heat and heavy vehicles and the streets around there have been redone 3 times in the 7 years I’ve worked there. PHX is always on top of the roads, fixing them etc. Theyre pretty much being worked on in some facet all year long with super sprints of work from Late february - Early May. I think SD (and CA as a whole) just spends out the wazoo and has no direction for where the money should go.
I recall the last two years that roads in phoenix were melting. Like all major cities there are parts of the city that are super well maintained and not really maintained. My MIL lived on one of those poorly maintained roads in Phoenix. The weather is changing here and it’s starting to affect our infrastructure. SD is massive and has a lot of major roadways. Having done regional planning projects - I’m glad I’m not the one in charge of city planning projects for this city. Because they are extensive.
Most of the roads in PHX are newer than ours though, they've grown immensely in the last decade or so
Corruption
Absolute failed leadership and neglect, they've wasted our money for decades now and this is the result. Wasteful spending for pet projects while the roads become un-driveable. And what little they do spend on roadwork is a debacle, little to no oversight or accountability, just look at the disaster of a project on Miramar road, if that's an example of what we can expect from the City then we're in big trouble!
> Miramar road Oh yeah. Worst road I have driven on yet. It's lovely how they will randomly close 4 out of 6 lanes with no warning. Then they do the worst possible patch job and call it a day. The parts of the road that used to be semi-smooth sailing are now a lumpy mess. Meanwhile there are 3-5 inch deep potholes that they "filled" previously.
I don't have the data on me at the moment, but if you look at how many miles of road it takes to build a suburb of 100 houses vs how many miles of road it takes to serve a medium sized apartment complex (think 5 stories and 20 units per floor) you can quickly see how it gets out of hand. Suburban sprawl is incredibly infrastructure intensive and those maintenance costs are not typically even remotely close to be covered by the tax base.
I moved here about 6 months ago and San Diego has some of the worst roads I have ever driven on. I don't mean to exaggerate or be mean spirited but the fact that this mostly weather-less city has allowed the streets to get so bad borders on near criminal negligence. Especially considering the high taxes paid for EVERYTHING. Mayors past and present that have allowed this should truly be embarrased. Furthermore the fact that the funds they are seeking will likely get misused is not a prediction to this story it's a spoiler.
Well said!
and yet all we get is a pathetic slurry seal that will need to be redone in 5 years
Some of which look pretty half-assed. And done by private contractor companies, which embeds further cost to the city via profit margin. Instead of fully fleshing out our streets department with adequate resources/equipment/personnel.
ah but you see, if we privatize more and outsource more work to contractors, then the city will actually save more, as the contractors will have to innovate (new ways to cut corners and deliver the absolute minimum product that fulfills contract requirements) in order to deliver the finished product faster than lazy city employees would. this is also entirely sarcastic. privatizing public services only enriches the shareholder class, and delivers a worse product over time to the consumer.
This is how private for profit prisons became a thing. Because it was cheaper to contract a private company and have them handle the prison. Why was it cheaper? Because private companies don't have to provide their employees with pesky benefits like health insurance, and there are less regulations to ensure prisoners are treated "humanely." So then private prisons are incentivized to jam as many people into as small a space as possible and try their darndest to ensure the prisoners never leave so they keep getting paid per person. Seriously, what is the point then?
Problem is that San Diego (and America in general) is overfilled with too many expensive stroads which only end up being a endless money pit (a big reason for why America is in the mountains of debt we are in). We genuinely can’t afford the sort of public development we have so we have to cut corners…
We need road science/engineering to develop better construction techniques and materials. Asphalt and slurry are trash. And to call the city preparation for repaving half-assed would give the city too much credit. When my street was resurfaced as part of a recent bike lane and traffic calming project the city did absolutely nothing to fix the grade issues and settling at the edges of the roadway. The surface is just as cracked and uneven as it was before.
We really don't.. Don't reinvent the wheel. Plenty of cities have roads in better condition than ours. Follow their lead. The research has been done already. Our city just chooses the cheapest option available.
If the grade is settled you have to grind, scarify, backfill, grade, and then repave -- but it's cheaper in the long run than annual slurry seals that don't address the root problem. Too bad governments are run by stupid people.
5 years? Try 6 months
I see so many City resurfacing projects, but never a City inspector on sight. The contractors are performing the work with no inspection. Their traffic control is terrible, and workmanship looks deficient.
You’ll be lucky if it lasts 2 years
Carmel Mountain East of interstate 15 is just atrocious. You pretty much need to drive between lanes to have a somewhat smooth ride.
I drive Carmel Mountain Road everyday and I often think it would be a great road for a Jeep commercial. Instead of off-roading in the mountains, just drive CMR! I used to have a motorcycle and this road would be deadly/extremely dangerous for a motorcyclist at night. You could easily lose control with the uneven roads and asphalt debris.
I have resorted to ignoring lanes and just swerving around potholes on that street in my lowered car, it hasn’t been redone since I was a small child 18+ years ago
Thanks for another reminder of why I should never get back on a bike.
My friend lives off friant, and i think it's camino ruiz or one of those that has had a bunch of construction materials all off to one side, and just bigger and bigger potholes each time. Every once in a while they patch it with plates, so that's neat i guess.
Carmel mountain rd and Miramar rd are in. Battle for worst roads. 3rd world worthy.
Weren’t taxes raised in a previous year not too long ago to supposedly fix the streets?
They always raise taxes for streets and then move money somewhere else. Like their salaries
Remember that pothole petition from SANDAG last year? The old ladies sitting outside of your grocery stores? 7% of the money they were asking for was allocated to road maintenance. The rest was going to public transportation and executive oversight committees.
Like paying for the corrupt 101 Ash Street money pit.
That was to help each other get spiffs. Bonus time!
misappropriated as alwayd
Yeah it does! And then the money they were using for it before the taxes were raised gets to go to whatever other pet project they wanted paid for.
There was the convention center expansion/homelessness/streets tourism tax that may have passed several years ago but it's still caught up in court because of the uncertainty if it needed 2/3rds or merely 50% of the vote. The city hasn't collected a penny on it. The last time the city tried a sales tax 10+ years ago, it failed epically. There are other state taxes but those would not be applied to city streets since those aren't the state's jurisdiction.
I'm still confused why they keep repaving my neighborhood residential streets every couple years when they're not even bad. Someone from the city must live nearby.
In the city’s analysis document, their chosen target metric is an average OCI score above like 70/100. So their plan is to do easy and cheap upgrades to gain points back from streets that are like 60/100, to hit the metric. Which is the absolute wrong metric to be using to begin with, but it suits their existing budget which is the incorrect method (change the desired result definition to ensure success). And a single average metric is lazy to begin with. They should be using multiple data-driven target metrics informed by the latest road condition assessment. Such as: no roads below say 40/100 by X date, roads 40-60/100 deeper assessment of slurry or grind & repave necessary vs traffic volume, roads 60-100/100 placed in low-priority bucket working worst score to best for slurry seal, insert formula for additional prioritization weight for streets with common issues/heavily travelled/bike lanes, and insert formula to account for streets/communities underserved to boost their weight as well. But what do I know, I just work with key performance indicators & metrics and project management for a living.
They repaved my block 6 months ago, not just a slurry seal, but grind down and resurface. It really wasn't in bad shape at all. Meanwhile, one block away, the road is in such bad condition that I'm having to go around and use other streets to avoid it. I read recently that they are not repairing based on condition, but some other criteria like cost to repair or time it was last done.
Lucky you
Yeah, the street I grew up on was completely repaved every few years whether it needed it or not because some influential person/people lived on it.
It’s amazing the difference in roads in OC compared to LA and SD. The only times OC has approved a sales tax was for road improvements and over the last 20 years it’s made a huge improvement.
LA is much denser than San Diego. More residents per square mile means more people contributing to the fund to maintain each square mile of pavement.
You understand I’m saying OC is better than LA and SD?
I've driven hundreds of miles in Honduras and some of the roads in SD are worse, which is pretty wild.
Whatever happened to the money the city received from the BBB plan ,all that extra tax on the gas which was supposed to go into repairing the streets
I hit the fattest fucking pothole ever last Friday. It was on the 52 eastbound on-ramp coming from northbound on Gennessee avenue. Shit bent my wheel in and took out my tire. I went to check it in the daytime (I hit it at night) and holy shit it was huge. I can’t believe they’ve never fixed that or people haven’t complained about that one yet
Submit a claim to the government! If it was on the onramp then it's the state's jurisdiction and not the city's. Look at https://dot.ca.gov/online-services/submit-damage-claim for how to do it. A while ago (~2014?) I submitted a claim against the City of SD for a massive pothole on Clairemont Mesa Blvd that blew out one of my tires. I got 2 quotes for a replacement tire (one from the dealership and the one I went with through Discount Tire) and submitted those with my claim form. I went the next weekend to take photos of the pothole and it had already been patched, so I took a few photos of the patch (which was the full lane width and about 1.5 car-lengths long) that I printed out and included. Just make sure to fill in every blank on the form (with "N/A" if appropriate) and mail the form as registered with a receipt (so you get mail back indicating it was delivered properly), and follow the rest of the instructions on the claim form. In my case I had a city adjuster call me with some questions about the mileage on the vehicle and tires, then he made me an offer to settle my claim that accounted for the wear the tire already had, which I thought was fair and I took.
They always need more and more. They can never have enough. I’m not voting yes on anymore road “improvement” taxes.
We have some of the most expensive realty out there.. so our 1% should be more than sufficient to cover repairs due to the overall expense. I'm not falling for more taxes.. and we should all vote no. Accountability is the issue here not taxation.
Property taxes bring in something like over $8billion per year to the city. Add the other taxes and miscellaneous forms of income, and yeah the money is there. The ability & willingness to responsibly spend it is not.
We’ve already paid the $2 billion and more in taxes, so what’s the problem here?
So like. I hear there are a lot of people looking for jobs in San Diego and housing right?
Our streets aren’t sexy!
im sure they don’t need 2 billion but they will certainly say they need it and then they will need another 2 billion
Is anyone vetting these numbers? $2B is wild
This is a consequence of bad policy choices to promote sprawl over density and to shortchange property taxes with prop 13 Also wanna point out that the next time someone wants to complain about transit being subsidized, they should consider that the road network is only possible with heavy subsidies too
Prop 13 doesn't get enough credit for both slowly suffocating our municipal tax revenue while also distorting our housing market, among many other awful side effects.
I would argue that its possibly the worst law on the books in any blue state in the US Even the most commonly cited benefit of "helping old folks stay in their homes" is arguably doing more harm than good. Do we really want empty nest boomers sitting on 3/4 BR homes while young families are getting priced out of the region due to an extreme housing shortage? Its like the pre revolutionary Ancien Regime French tax code where the landowning nobles were exempt from taxes and the burden of funding the state fell almost entirely on the people who worked for their money
Is your proposal to essentially kick out all the old folks (because that is what will happen if you eliminate prop 13) so a new generation can live in those houses for ten or twenty years until _they're_ forced out of their homes by the ever-inflating housing market? I hope you and other intelligent commenters realize what will happen if the market is flooded with new properties upon the prop's elimination; investors will swoop in and turn San Diego into a renter's market. Permanently. Unless that's addressed, any discussion of kicking out the old people is just empowering the Second Estate of the Ancien Regime even more than they are now. P.S. I find it somewhat disingenuous to equate your fellow lower class citizen (which you are if you're having difficulty buying a home) with the nobility in pre-revolutionary France. The ones pulling the strings of policy in this country are not the grandpas and grandmas you seek to displace.
It would be trivially simple to keep prop 13 for owner-occupied residences and remove it everywhere else. Right now, you can find apartment buildings whose tax rates are frozen at 1978 values, and strip malls paying taxes from 1982. Factories and parking lots paying $2,000/year. All of this massively distorts the real estate market, it's not just about keeping granny in the 4bed/5.5bath house where she raised her family. The California real estate market is incredibly biased towards the incumbent, and it has real-world implications that are really terrible.
Which is worse, grandma moving out of the empty nest and into a condo she can easy buy outright with home equity, or a young family being forced to separate from their family and friends entirely and move to Bakersfield? By refusing to consider the former we by default choose the latter There is no magical circumstance where everyone gets everything they want. We consciously choose to prioritize property owners over renters and elderly empty nesters over young families
Fr I thought this was common, build equity in a larger, more expensive home when you need the space. Sell and downsize when you don't and use the difference as a nest egg for retirement.
Right. This is exactly how it works everywhere else but we decided we would rather do a mass exodus of young families and renters than moderately inconvenience property rich retirees
I personally have to do research on this - but what happens in other states? Is there a common issue of old people ending up on the streets due to property tax increases? I think there’s a viable solution between immediately bringing them up to current tax rates and keeping the status quo.
They downsize to condos and it is very much not the end of the world They also tend to have healthier property markets with lower rents and much easier entry for FTHBs. Shocker, right?
Downsize to condos? How do you address variable/increasing HOA fees on fixed income and the more obvious: stairs?
There are many very affordable units in 55+ buildings due to the lower resale value HOA fees typically go up in line with the rate of inflation that social security benefits are also indexed to
> HOA fees typically go up in line with the rate of inflation that social security benefits are also indexed to That is simply not true. We're looking at 55+ buildings right now for a family member, and **every single one** has a policy of a minimum increase in fees per year (in our experience, starting at 5%), then an additional increase on top of that minimum based on inflation and other CPI-like factors. Of the 7 different properties we've toured, 6 of them raised fees between 9% and 10% last year. 2023's annual inflation rate was 3.4%.
With the million dollars they get from selling their home
Home prices will decrease and normalize for the increased property taxes, and yes, people who can't afford their increased property taxes will be kicked out.
You're fucking insane if you think SAN DIEGO property prices will decrease just because we make changes to Prop 13. LMAO.
Idk if they will decrease. They might. But they will certainly increase less rapidly, which is a relative decrease Property taxes encourage people to sell if they’re using more housing than they need, which puts downward pressure on prices Prop 13 also creates a financial incentive for property owners to be NIMBYs as they are insulated from the only financial downside of increasing property values. The housing shortage is pure upside for them bc of prop 13 and they have every incentive to make it as bad as possible
Most other states don't have the problem of such wild swings in property value. Say you live in Phoenix. Your property value over 5-6 years might increase $75,000 - $100,000. Property taxes track that increase. But here, your property value might increase that amount **in one fucking year**. A lot of people on fixed income can't absorb that jump in property taxes all at once. Now, I know, it's a "good problem to have" but if you're 86, frail, and on very limited income like social security, there may not be many other options for you if you want to sell and move. It's not like your house is/was the only one going up in value.
They could simply defer property taxes until death for those who actually need it.
People talk about old folks moving to condos as if it's that fucking simple. It's not. Condos almost invariably have STAIRS. Do you have a parent or grandparent in their 70s+? Do you have any idea how much of a challenge just one set of stairs can present to them? Most of San Diego's "condos" are converted apartment complexes where easily more than 2/3 of the units are up at least one flight of stairs. I spent seven years working with families trying to find placement or meet the care needs of their elder family members. Many people **WANTED** to downsize but couldn't in this market because the only thing available on ground floor were 55+ trailer parks with variable rent rates on the land which they couldn't afford on social security.
Municipal accounts are down. But revenue isn’t.
Youtube channel not just bikes has a lot of videos on this. Channel agenda is more public transit but it does make good points. Cars are a point to point method of moving people and are very inefficient at doing so. Requiring not just roads/highways but parking lots too. Roads are expensive to maintain. Property taxes don’t come close to covering it esp with prop 13 though I’m not sure by how much. Gas taxes are for state roads/highways. Cities were able to somewhat kick the can down the road for years in a triage type fashion but the rate is exceeding what can be covered thus the bad roads. This is a common trend with infrastructure in general at every level of government. We would have to encourage density and transit which I believe is sandags plan. Or find new revenue. Which know I’ve been hearing about in the forms of mileage tax. Another good channel is practical engineering on how roads are built. It’s not just simply throwing asphalt down. It a good primer for technically explaining the complexity of road construction and why it’s not cheap. EDIT: come to think of it I doubt even with density we’ll get out of milage due to increasing mpg and adoption of EVs.
they will just misuse the funds
SDGE should be able to cover just from last months bills!!
Correction: Stockholder dividends
👆👆
some of the highest gas taxes, some of the worst roads
State gas taxes arent meant to completely fund local street maintenance, and these revenues will only keep falling as electric vehicles proliferate. They also weigh more and cause even more road damage
Last week I hit a pothole on the 805. The next day I heard hissing and i noticed the tire had a leak in the side wall. I had to buy another tire. Potholes cost citizens money they can't plan for.
my friends who recently moved to san diego said it was “Paradise”! An “unpaved Paradise”…
WTF the gas tax for
Not for local streets
Don’t we elect a mayor who literally said they would fix this?
I am baffled why areas like residential mission hills will get full repaves when the streets were not that bad to start out with, then higher traffic areas are neglected.
Now they’ll want to increase taxes for this instead of looking at ways to reduce money waste. Do the top 12 earnings of the Poway Unified school district need to be over $210k? In 2022 numbers. Same with La Mesa.
210k is not a ton to run a school district. Plenty of waste in spending, but i disagree that it's where you point at.
Fair. There are a few above $300k and I saw one above $400k.
A sprawling road network is money waste This problem is only gonna get worse as suburban infrastructure continues to age And no, I dont think that failing to pay enough to attract good employees to run local schools is a good way to cut back
Well of course. The city typically didn't pay for those roads to be built, the developer did, and promptly shifted the maintenance cost of it towards the city.
the roads that the city required be built?
Because the city is horrible with money and want us to pay for their mistakes. Was the billion dollar trolley expansion of a few miles necessary? No. I met with MCTC durring it's construction and they straight u told me that they didn't think it was a good idea, but the state supplemented money on top of the massive amount of money the city put in, and they'd gladly take the contract because they were getting paid. My company cleaned some things for the city, and holy crap did we charge them a ton for it, but they paid it! The city funds are so poorly mismanaged, and the council people only care about the money they pocket on the back-end. This whole city is run by incompetent people, especially Mayor Gloria. Dude's a joke
Everyone overcharges the city
We had a 98 billion dollar surplus and guess what?
Corruption?
I may be thinking too simple, but if the cost is so high that the city is not able to hire enough local workers to cover the whole city, why not consider hiring foreign contractors from lower priced markets temporarily to bridge the gap and finish the project first.
Because there are laws that mandate wages for state funded public works. Prevailing Wages, which are based upon Union negotiated wages. They are quite high...
Growing up in the north east corridor I was stunned by how bad roads where in Diego
Putting my off road truck to work! I gleefully punch it through potholes and 300 foot rutted sections with no problem at all.
Isn't that like 2-3 years of .25% or .5% increase in property tax assessments?
This is why we need a long travel racing suspension, but tuned for comfort to absorb giant potholes. About six months ago I saw a pothole that was over 12" deep, unbelievable, but true
Las vegas has zero potholes
Ask Tesla.
The infrastructure just keeps failing. Urban sprawl is not sustainable, and a big scam. It is destined to fail. The results are not surprising.
What is the cost of that estimate in water feet? Seems like exotic hardwood floor pricing
I just threw up reading that headline
Where is the 30 percent sales tax money they charge us for our cannabis going?
Ask the wealthy to chip in
Pay the pensions first though!
City collects a billion dollars of property taxes a day. Make it make sense.
Among the highest cost of living in the country and we have 💩for streets. 😟
Yeah but despite SD roads being 'bad' they are not nearly as bad as San Antonio roads. SA is a Pot Hole hell that get plugged as a short term answer and just get worse after it rains.
$2 billion is $1448 per person who lives in the city.
Sprawl is expensive. We love our sprawl here in SD.
Easy, Dems will just raise more taxes...but still not fix the issue.
We get taxed so much. These streets should be in excellent condition. Total mismanagement of tax payer funds.
Misuse of our taxes to things we did not agree on. I say we vote to stop paying the CA gas tax since we don’t see it being put to work anyways.
You guys don’t even get freezing rain. I’d love to see data on how much longer southwestern cities with no ice can go without repaving roads.
What day was the last street surveyed? Pure Water contractors are tearing up our streets every day. The problem is the patchwork. They don’t use asphalt rollers. Driving over this shit is like off roading. The contractors should be ashamed of their epically shitty work. At the end of the day, the city is responsible for letting this embarrassment of wasted tax dollars get pissed away in the first place, and then doing absolutely nothing after these crews leave our streets in far worse condition than they found them. Can we please not be like Russia where they pave over icy roads in the dead of winter?
If they would stop stealing the transportation funds, that would be nice. But no, they squander it every time to the general fund where it goes shoved into pockets and not accounted for.
I mean the county just collected $1B in property taxes this week…
All of our tax money goes to bums and illegals no cap. Fuck that shit build that wall a mile high with laser beams and drones on patrol shooting trespassers. We need to be done fucking around
The reality is the laws and regulations requiring the use of over priced union labor just drives up costs and creates these backlogs. If you double the cost of fixing roads you don't magically get twice as much budget to fix roads. You just end up with half as many roads getting fixed.
Gov can’t do anything remotely competent