VanStat Roads and Sidewalks Capital Funding

Statement Watch

Thank you. Mayor and Council, my name is Eric Mattel. I am the Director of Streets and Engineering Services. And today I'm here to talk with you about the condition of our roads and sidewalks. So for each of roads and sidewalks, we'll start with our assets and their condition. We'll talk about trends and projections. And we'll also talk about the challenges that kind of face each of those parts of the network. We'll talk about how we choose our projects and examples of some of the coordinated projects we've completed recently. So we'll start with roads. So from an asset management perspective, we classify our roads into three categories. The first is the major road network. So these are roads of regional significance. They are high-volume, multi-lane roads. They serve as major transit corridors or truck routes, so streets like Granville or Broadway or Hastings. And these are, in fact, the maintenance and rehab are funded entirely from TransLink. There's 121 kilometers of major road network in the city of Vancouver. The next category is our own arterial network. So along with the major road network, the arterials form the backbone of the transportation network. So also high volume, multi-lane, and there's 239 kilometers of arterial road in the city. The last category are the local roads. So there's nearly 1,100 kilometers of local road in the city. This category is a little more varied because there are, you know, the quiet residential street that you might think of when you think of a local road, but also in this category are higher priority local roads, local street bikeways, access to hospitals, routes to school, along with industrial roads and some commercial streets as well. So how do we assess the condition of these pavements and these roads? So every three to four years, we conduct a citywide survey of every street in the city. We do this following best practice. So we use vehicles that are equipped with sophisticated instrumentation. And we measure pavement distress, smoothness, strength. And from all of that data that we collect, we assign a score to every single block in the city. This score is a 0 to 100 score. It's called pavement condition index. And along with that, we also build a model of the roads in the city. And so with that model, we can... determine what are the best investments, what are the highest priority candidates for rehabilitation and repaving. And we also use this data to understand what different investment scenarios, what outcomes we can get from different investments. So this graph here is a theoretical plot of pavement condition and degradation over time. So on the vertical axis you have pavement condition and on the horizontal axis you have time.

And so over the course, like the life of a road, it would start in very good condition and it would deteriorate over time. And really what this is showing is that the most cost effective way to maintain a road is to actually keep it in sort of good and very good condition and to, you know, utilize the lower cost interventions like crack sealing and thin overlays. But that allowing a road to deteriorate further into poor and very poor condition, this becomes a much more expensive thing to repair, requires more extensive reconstruction. And it's also in this zone of sort of fair and poor roads where we have to do reactive pothole patching. So we get a number of requests from council and the public inquiring about the condition of our roads and potholes and sort of this is the overall condition of the road and why we have to do so much of that. So to give you a sense of what we talk about when we say very good and fair and very poor, these are examples. So on the left, you have a block of East Hastings that we paved last year. So this is a road in very good condition. On the right of this slide, you'll see West 10th Avenue. So this is a street that's in very poor condition. You can see the cracking and all of the surface defects. We will pave this road later this year. And in the middle, there is a block of commercial street that is in fair condition. You can start to see some of the cracking sort of longitudinally along the roadway. So when we complete our pavement condition surveys, we can tell the overall condition across the city. And so what this map kind of tells you, and I can appreciate that there's a lot on it, is that condition really varies across the city. The major road networks of those roads that are maintained or funded by TransLink are generally in very good condition, with the exception of Broadway, which because of subway construction, we'll come back and repave that shortly after that's completed. Our own city arterials, though, about half of them are in poor and very poor condition, and the local roads are kind of a mix of poor and good and fair conditions. The budgets that we have to work with, for the major road network, we have about $5 to $6 million, or until recently we did. TransLink has recently made a significant increase to their annual funding for the major road network rehab. For the arterial roads, we have about $3 to $4 million, $3 to $5 million annually, and that funding has stayed pretty flat over the last few capital plans. Similarly for local roads, we have $2 to $3 million. Again, that funding has been flat over the last number of capital plans. And so what that means is that for the city arterials, we can repave about 1% of the network, which would be okay if a road lasted for about 100 years, but it does not. And for local roads, it's really only a very small proportion of local roads that we can repave. And in fact, a lot of that is really just to deal with kind of emergency spot repairs that come up.

So this is a long-term trend. So this is a combination of measured data. So there's the red dashed line at 2023. To the left of that line, those are data points that we've collected through our survey. And to the right is what our pavement model tells us will happen at current investment levels. So the top line is actually TransLink's major road network. So TransLink sets a condition target of 75 PCI, and they fund to that condition. And so until recently, the average condition of the major road network in the city has been above 75 PCI, and it was only with the last survey did we see that dip. And that dip actually happened regionally, so not just in the city of Vancouver. And TransLink has responded to this data. And so their annual contribution to maintain our roads has been historically about $6 million a year. And they've increased that to $16 million a year moving forward. And so we're confident that the condition of the major road network will recover. So that's shown by the upward arrow. And that it will, you know, at least hit 75 PCI moving forward. If the city continues its trend of sort of flat funding in terms of absolute dollars for our own arterial network and the local roads, the expectation is that those roads will continue to deteriorate. And so you can kind of see where the trend line is taking us. Yeah, maybe I'll leave it there. And so to provide a bit more context, so this is a graph that shows the arterial road network. So the red line is the projected condition over time at current funding. And we added the green line, which would show the level of investment that would be required to sort of hold the average condition of the network flat. And so what that would mean is that some roads would deteriorate, others would be renewed, but that the average condition of the network would be stable. And so that would be an increase from about $5 million a year for arterial renewal to about $8 or $9 million a year. Similarly for the local roads, our annual budget is about $2.5 million a year, and it would take about $10 million a year to hold the average condition of the network stable. So what causes the deterioration of our roadways? I'm going to run through six kind of topics here. So these are the major drivers for roadway degradation. So we have heavy vehicles, specialty materials, peat areas, utility cuts, unimproved streets, and winter weather. So the first one is heavy vehicles, so trucks and buses. This is the primary reason why roads deteriorate, particularly our arterial network. You just can't build a road that's going to withstand the wear and tear of these heavy vehicles, particularly starting and stopping or on heavy truck routes. And so the image on the right, this is a section of 49th Avenue where you can kind of see the effect of a bus stop where a heavy vehicle is starting and stopping repeatedly in the same location.

Specialty materials are a challenge for us. They are expensive to procure, they're expensive to install and maintain, and they require specialty skill sets and equipment. peat areas. So peat is like a highly compressible organic soil or subsurface condition that exists in different parts of our city. And so in these areas, what you'll see is that the road is very typically in poor condition. Sidewalks are often sort of undulating and even sort of fences and houses are sometimes askew because there really just is no solid ground to build on in peat areas. And just for context, this is a map of the peat areas across the city that we're aware of. And so it's a problem that exists in a number of different neighborhoods and is, from a maintenance and renewal perspective, quite challenging. utility cuts for development or other kind of third-party utility work. We collect fees when folks cut our roads, and they have to do that in order to service development and renew utilities. But whenever you cut a road, you introduce a new seam in a road, a new point of failure. And even those fees that we collect, they can't fully restore the road to its prior condition. So this is kind of an ongoing battle for us. Unimproved streets. So when we say unimproved streets, we're talking about streets without curb and gutter. And so a street without curb and gutter... The curb and gutter serves a number of different purposes for drainage and other things, but it also holds the pavement structure together. And so when you don't have curb and gutter, you get separation of the asphalt much more easily, cracking in the roadway. And on streets like this, you also have typically gravel shoulders where parked vehicles are going to sort of mount and dismount the roadway. And so you get a lot more cracking and damage, which tends to allow more water in. So roads without curb and gutter tend to not last nearly as long as roads that are built with concrete curb and gutter. And finally, winter weather. So, you know, particularly in our city where the roads are, you know, typically not in great condition, there's already entry points for water through cracking and other defects in the roadway. And the freeze-thaw cycle of water where water is expanding and contracting over and over causes damage both to the surface and below the surface, particularly in our climate where, you know, our winters tend to hover around zero degrees. And so we get number of those cycles kind of over and over. So that's a big problem for road condition. Moving on to sidewalks. So we have about 2,200 kilometers of sidewalk in the city of Vancouver. We conducted our first detailed sidewalk condition survey in 2021.

So this was inspectors going out and measuring every defect, every tree heave, every crack. And so we now have very, very good data for the sidewalk network overall. In addition to that, we have inspectors who walk every sidewalk every year looking for trip hazards. And this is where you'll see crews come and install asphalt fillets to ensure that there are smooth transitions from panel to panel. This also protects us from lawsuits and other things. So kind of unlike the roads, the sidewalk condition overall looks pretty good. About 10% of our sidewalks are in poor and very poor condition, but we have a lot of sidewalks. And so when you have a lot of something, even 10% represents a big backlog of repair that we have to get to. And so we have about $500 million of backlog in terms of sidewalk outstanding repairs. So if we were to try to fix everything, that's what we think it would take to do that. Our annual funding for sidewalks, though, is about a million dollars and has been for a number of years. And so we're able to kind of do very little with this money. And in fact, you know, this represents about a 400-year backlog in terms of sidewalk repair overall. And so in practice, our sidewalk repair budget is largely used for emergency spot repairs, things like that. And so kind of similar to roads, we have specific challenges with sidewalks. And, you know, along with peat and utility cuts and specialty materials, the primary issue that we deal with the sidewalks is tree heaves. And so, you know, over the course of time, our city developed, we planted lots of large trees adjacent to sidewalks. And those trees and root systems are now like lifting panels and creating mobility challenges for folks across the city. We continue to plant trees, but we do it in a much smarter way. We use larger soil volumes. We have correct offsets. We choose better species. And so we don't expect this problem to reoccur with the new infrastructure that we build, but we have many hundreds of thousands of trees that we have to manage adjacent to our sidewalks. So how do we choose our projects? So we have a huge need for repair, and we have limited budget to work with. And so how do we choose? We base our determinations, obviously, on asset condition and on the outputs of our payment model, as one example that I talked about earlier. We look for projects that serve as many users as possible. We assemble the data that we get through service requests, and we input that into our decision-making process. We look for high return on investment projects. And so what this often means is partnering with others who are doing work in the roadway.

So that might be transportation, it might be parks, utilities, whether they're internal or external, coordinating with development or working with our partners like TransLink. And we also have large internal construction crews. And so this is a unique benefit that we have that other municipalities in our region don't. And we also have our own asphalt plant. And so what this allows us to do is deliver asphalt and concrete work very affordably, relatively speaking, and manage the quality and the timing and the control over all of our projects. When it comes to sidewalk, we look at a number of things to figure out where we would want to try to invest in sidewalks. And so separate from the full sort of $500 million backlog, if we look at where we see high pedestrian volumes, where are routes to transit, where are routes to school, where are routes to other amenities, we've mapped those things and have developed a way of choosing or prioritizing sidewalk investments where we can. And then so finally here, I'll just run through a few examples of what these coordinated projects sort of look like. So this one here is West King Edward. So this was completed last year. So rather than just a pure utility project where we're replacing sewers and water and having a large cut in the road, we're also repaving the road. We're making transportation improvements. We're introducing green infrastructure. And so in doing that, we're able to deliver much more value with a single mobilization and, you know, a single traffic impacts and other of the usual sort of like construction overheads. And so we're able to get more value in this way. This is an example downtown where after a number of utility cuts had taken place, rather than repairing cut by cut, we're rebuilding the entire intersection and also taking the opportunity to make other enhancements to the intersection from a design perspective. Here's an example. This is the sidewalk on Howe Street near Canada Place. So, you know, we had heard from our partners, and we understand that this is a very important place. You know, it's a welcome mat for visitors and others, and the overall condition of the sidewalk here is very poor, and so we prioritized this as one of our kind of few large-scale sidewalk rehab projects recently. This is an example of a bus route conversion downtown. So, you know, when we do get new bus routes in the city, that is very exciting, but it also introduces new challenges for us. Again, the weight of those vehicles, particularly on roads that are not designed for them, can be, you know, it just introduces a new... maintenance obligation for us over time and so when we can we upgrade the road to you know ensure that those changes in the network have a minimal impact overall and so this is an example where we've rebuilt the pavement structure and introduced other infrastructure at bus stops to to help with that and that was my last slide

Statement Watch

Yeah, Lon LeClaire, General Manager of Engineering Services. With our streets crews, they don't see the differentiation that transportation does. So in transportation, we have kind of a further classification, which would include collector. But for the purposes of our streets maintenance, this is... a street that carries heavy vehicles like trucks and buses. And so for that reason, we treat it as arterial in the world of road maintenance.

Statement Watch

It'd be like a rough estimate. Good morning, Ross McFarland, Streets Capital Program Manager. So on the topic of bus pads, TransLink does provide some cost share funding for kind of installing new bus pads as bespoke projects, but also in the course of us doing our larger arterial or MRN paving projects, we also look for opportunities where we can install those bus pads at the same time.

Okay, and do you have an idea of what they cost? Are they super expensive or... It's okay.

I'd have to go back and check with our PM team of some of the recent costs for the ones we've been installing.

Statement Watch

Good morning, Mayor, Council, Sandra Singh, Deputy City Manager. The way we interpret this motion is this is a direction, if passed, this would be a direction from Council to include this amount in the draft capital plan. That plan will include trade-offs across a wide variety of city services, and we'll bring that to Council for consideration, and it will ultimately be your decision how to allocate it across the many city assets.

Yeah, this is not my first capital plan, so I just want to clarify that in the report back that it'll be very clear where this particular motions funding is coming from versus general trade-offs.

In the capital plan, our finance colleagues typically do indicate what the funding source is for the variety of assets, whether it's DCLs or CACs or tax-funded or government contributions.