TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — It can be a rocky road driving through Pima County. Now the county is continuing a multi-year push to fix miles and miles of roads, with a promise to repair more than a hundred miles of roads this fiscal year.
Vanessa Duley’s still waiting for a smoother road in front of her house but Pima County’s given the rest of the neighborhood a nice smooth coat of fresh pavement.
She says, “Yeah, and it's nice to drive through the neighborhood. We can go to El Molinito’s and grab a bite to eat and it's not so bumpy.”
Pima County’s been giving paving crews a workout for about five years.
The county says up to now it has done more than 850 miles of repairs and preservation over those five years:
Now Pima County’s promising to add almost 108 miles of road work this year.
You can see if your neighborhood road or other roads important to you are in this year’s repair lists by visiting the Pima County Road Pavement Repair page at this link.
While you judge road conditions with the seat of your pants, Pima County judges those conditions with engineering data. County pavement preservation manager Jason Boley says for neighborhood streets, the worst roads get the first pavement.
“So what that means is we'll have any given subdivision we'll find what we call a 'trigger road,' which is our worst condition road of that area. And then we rank those. And then we select—we take that trigger road, pick the subdivision it's in and then keep on going down the list until we have allocated the funding for that year.”
Pima County decides when bigger roads get work based on how big they are, how busy they are and whether it makes sense to do work when a road’s moderately bad to avoid more expensive repairs later.
Greg is one driver who says it is great to look out and see smooth new pavement.
“It takes roadwork. It takes people to do it, you know? Looks like they've got it done now. I know a few others that could use it."
FIND OUT MORE: Pima County Road Pavement Repair & Preservation Program
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Craig Smith is a reporter for KGUN 9. With more than 40 years of reporting in cities like Tampa, Houston and Austin, Craig has covered more than 40 Space Shuttle launches and covered historic hurricanes like Katrina, Ivan, Andrew and Hugo. Share your story ideas and important issues with Craig by emailing craig.smith@kgun9.com or by connecting on Facebook and Twitter.
