It is one of those ‘good news/ bad news’ realities in Colorado, as well as the rest of the nation at least for road maintenance workers. The ‘good news’ is that there will always be work. The ‘bad news’ is that, well, there will always be work. No street or roadway will ever be completely finished; road repairs are simply a reality. Yet, no matter how much work is directed toward making a road better, safer and easier to navigate, it’s a thankless job.
Potholes, also known colloquially as everything from ‘chuck-holes,’ to ‘road gashes’ along with scores of other more colorful or even obscene names, are the bane of drivers and municipal budgets. They can be anything from a small opening in the pavement to a gaping, crater-like hole capable of creating damage that no driver wants to deal with. And in Colorado and everywhere else, they’re the cost of hitting the road and, perhaps, the road hitting back.
The city of Aurora, one of the fastest growing metropolitan centers in Colorado—its population now exceeds that of Cincinnati, Cleveland and Pittsburgh—is working daily to maintain its more than 4,100 miles of roadway for its nearly 400,000 citizens.
In 2022, the Aurora City Council, said Michael Brannan, Aurora Senior Media Relations Strategist, passed what it calls its ‘Buildup Aurora’ measure. Buildup Aurora was designed to maintain streets in the city’s 35 neighborhoods with “the greatest needs for street repairs.” Not only will it address road conditions but also sidewalks and curbs due or overdue for maintenance.
Aurora, like other cities in Colorado, shares its main roads with the state and nation. Colfax Avenue, as an example, is also U.S. Highway 40 and, at nearly 50 miles in length, the longest single commercial road in the entire United States. It stretches from Golden on the west to Headlight Road in Strasburg on the east. It also takes a beating in sheer traffic volume.
The Denver Regional Council of Governments estimated that Aurora’s stretch of Colfax handles nearly 40,000 vehicles a day. Rarely does a single weekday go by without some roadwork being performed on it, much of it being pothole maintenance. The street, once the main east-west route before the interstate system was built, crosses municipalities. Denver’s stretch of Colfax Avenue begins at Sheridan Boulevard, once referred to as State Highway 95, and ends at Galena Street in Aurora where it extends to Strasburg.
While most understand what a pothole is, Brannan’s official and more benign description is “a road defect less than 24 inches in diameter” that can usually be repaired with a hot asphalt mixture. A victim of a pothole has a far more colorful and angered way of describing one.
A pothole can cause a wide degree of emotions and inspired language, not simply English, either. They can also be one-way tickets to car repair shops. Beyond hitting one, they can also be expensive causing tire blowouts, misalignments or worse. But expecting a city to pay the cost of repairs is another matter. Whether a claim with the city is successful is a determination made by the city. Pursuing it may mean hiring a lawyer. For many if not most, it’s often not worth the time nor expense.
The state’s budget for maintaining Colorado’s roadways is $285 million. It covers everything from road and bridge improvements to, yes, potholes. “CDOT maintenance crews,” said CDOT spokesperson Tamara Rollison, “are continuous- ly repairing pavements, bridges, guardrails and other assets.” But, because of what Rollison calls “a challenging year due to a record winter season which was hard on pavements and caused some significant damage,” an extra $25 million for road work was allocated by the state.
While the past year’s winter certainly paid off handsomely for the state’s water shortfall and ending the drought, it did nothing for its roads. When the snow that filled cracks in the roads melted then froze again and repeated the process each night—sometimes for long stretches at a time—smaller or at least manageable cracks expanded turning into potholes. Very simply, it’s one of nature’s natural cycles.
In Aurora, according to national ratings, the weather and simple aging, has created a road system judged to be “fair or below” optimal conditions. In fact, 58 percent of the city’s roads fall into this category. But the rating does not make Aurora’s more than 4,000 miles of roads unique or necessarily hazardous. The entire state faces a similar challenge.
President Biden’s signing of the Infrastructure Bill will provide some relief for aging or poorly maintained roadways and bridges, along with a number of other things. Ideally, the $110 billion measure will raise the state’s ranking above its current 37th place among the country’s best maintained road system.
According to the Department of Transportation, the top three states for best road conditions are Idaho, Wyoming and Tennessee. Each has a rating of at least 94 percent in the ranking of acceptable conditions. The DOT ranks Rhode Island, New Jersey and Hawaii as the worst. Colorado ranks 37th.
Pothole repair in the U.S. is no small thing. Fixing potholes across the U.S. costs approximately $3 billion. The average cost of a repair caused by potholes is estimated at around $600. But adding up the total cost of vehicle repairs caused by these roadway blemishes is huge. The DOT estimates that national bill for this comes in at more than $26 billion annually.
