(The Center Square) – While fuming over the state of California roads a few weeks ago on a harrowing drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco — I swore to look into why they were so bad. What I found shocked me to my pot-hole-rattled bones – California’s measured road quality had increased 53% since 2015. That’s weird. What’s weirder is that federal statistics claim 65% of California’s roads have disappeared.
This set off alarms in my head as I wondered if road “quality” was increasing because of a conscious decision to measure less “bad” roadway to make the state’s roads seem better than they are. While 65% of the state’s roads disappeared on paper, they certainly hadn’t in reality.
So I set out to find out who made this dubious decision. After dozens of emails, phone calls and conversations with both Sacramento and Washington D.C., I have found that all the people in state and federal government who should know, well, don’t. And I am no closer to finding out.
The long-term decline in measured roads in California began in 2019 when Gavin Newsom became governor. The first year, 15,000 miles disappeared. The second year, another 14,000. By 2022, another 6,000 were gone.
I first emailed the governor’s office, but they referred me to the California Department of Transportation. No luck there either. You’d think the CalTrans would know where the roads are. They told me to ask the United States Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics. If anyone would know about the disappearing roads, surely it would be a guy sitting behind a desk on the other side of the country.
After several calls, I eventually found the Bureau of Transportation Statistics librarian who promised to check with BTS experts. They suggested the United States Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration would have the answer because obviously the statistics guys couldn’t possibly answer a question about statistics.
BTS contacted FHWA on my behalf, with the FHWA saying “Caltrans does in fact submit Highway Performance Monitoring System data to us annually,” and said they would contact someone called the Caltrans’ “HPMS data coach.” The data coach didn’t respond.
BTS told me that, “The States are the ultimate collectors and providers of the data,” so they suggested I call Caltrans again.
Armed with this response, I called again. They responded with gobbledygook, “The actual measured conditions can vary from one year to the next depending on the condition of the pavement, the presence or absence of highway construction closures, where in the lane the pavement data collection van drives, lane shifts for construction, the vendor’s equipment conducting the survey, and other factors.” Not by 30,000 miles, I thought.
They continued: “The Caltrans managed state highway system is consistently around 52,000 lane miles. Please contact the Bureau of Transportation Statistics for more information on the year-to-year variation of the data.”
No, it is not. Dropping from the sustained mid-fifty thousand range to nearly twenty thousand in 2022 does not seem within the range of typical variation.
I also considered the drop off could be explained by changes in federal reporting requirements, but upon reviewing other states’ data tables, I found some states with extremely consistent roadway measurements, and ones with major discrepancies, suggesting what’s happening in California is odd but not unheard of. Alaska, for example, has remained consistent but steadily growing, Alabama has been in the same 20,000 range, while Arkansas has the same disappearing road problem.
But now back to California — SB 1, California’s “Gas Tax” law from 2017, did mention road measurements, but seemed to require an increase in road quality reporting to help taxpayers see progress from the gas tax increase, meaning any change at the state level would lean towards more miles being reported.
I emailed Caltrans again, receiving a call back from the same helpful Caltrans staffer, telling me that a team had searched Caltrans’ databases for days but “can’t find those figures. Those are not the figures we sent to BTS … my team … couldn’t find anything in our database that we’d ever sent for that study or any study.”
The Caltrans staff member then directed me to contact FHWA to see where they got the HPMS data from — but FHWA already said Caltrans does submit HPMS data, and BTS said it posts the data it gets from FHWA. At this point, I was confused. Somewhere, someone was collecting or creating data, transferring it to the feds and leaving no trace.
With $52 billion in federal road spending and on top of another $154 billion in state and local spending in 2021, according to the Urban Institute, road condition data is needed to see how taxpayer funds are being spent. In California, the state is allocating $7.2 billion in gas taxes this year towards road spending.Are we getting our money’s worth?
I am not even sure the road from LA to San Francisco even exists anymore; as bumpy as it was it could have been a cattle trail. It is going to take someone with more pull – and more patience than me – to find out exactly what is going on.
