Maintaining Oahu’s roadways is essential for our resident motorists, who endure some of the worst traffic conditions in the nation. But the current condition of many of those roadways rightly leads many residents to question the quality of that work and whether roads in some communities are being unfairly ignored.
Despite hundreds of thousands of Oahu potholes being repaired over the past decade, disturbing findings emerged in a two-day series, “Paradise for Potholes,” by Star-Advertiser reporter Marcel Honore:
>> State officials have largely ignored a federally funded 2008 study — “Pavement Preservation Technical Appraisal” — that included 16 recommendations to better preserve the islands’ state roads. In fact, a Department of Transportation (DOT) spokesman was unable to find a copy of the report. Further, DOT did not respond to Honore’s repeated requests to interview its Highways Division director, Edward Sniffen, leaving more questions unanswered.
>> To keep up with the tens of thousands of annual pothole repairs across Oahu, the city’s 37-member pothole-repair team uses the fastest but least-durable methods — a “throw and go” method using hot asphalt — to patch potholes on streets in need of repaving. That results in repairs being made again and again to the same potholes.
>> Waianae has many roads full of patches, but the city has not repaved any Leeward Coast streets in the first three years of its touted campaign to resurface the island’s worst roads. By contrast, almost all of Kailua’s city roads were repaved within those three years.
The state DOT’s lack of information and transparency must be called out. It’s unclear whether recomendations in the 2008 technical appraisal by Larry Galehouse, director of the Michigan State University-based National Center for Pavement Preservation, were ever implemented.
Galehouse said the state’s approach to road upkeep was more reactive than proactive, that its crews needed better training and that DOT lacked guidelines for preservation treatments.
DOT spokesman Tim Sakahara said in an email merely that the Highway Division “does its best balancing its limited budget and time to ensure that it can meet its highway related duties.” While the limited resources are at the maintenance level, he said, which includes pothole patching, federal funding is available for larger projects.
Those federal funds could be tapped for repaving, which is often part of approved projects to rehab state roadways. But in October, the state DOT reported it had $656.5 million in unspent federal highway funds — a pool of resources that should be utilized for ongoing projects to improve state roads.
All this raises questions about how funds are being prioritized and used, and demands better public accounting and answers.
Both the state and city are lagging behind the times in using sealants such as “crack seal” (stripes of rubbery sealant that trace a crack) and “slurry seal” (emulsion that coats the entire road surface), based on a schedule that predicts how quickly those roads fall apart. Use of sealants as part of pavement preservation programs began in the 1970s, some 40 years ago.
The city finally partnered with the University of Hawaii-Manoa and the Hawaii Asphalt Pavement Industry recently to study how different crack seals perform on several residential blocks in Pearl City, and eventually plans to use crack seal in other areas.
Ross Sasamura, director of the city’s Department of Facility Maintenance, said the city is crafting a program and collecting data so it knows when to have crews apply crack seal and slurry seal.
As for repaving: It is long overdue on the Leeward Coast, especially in Waianae, where pothole patchwork is the sad norm rather than the exception. At long last, the city’s repaving program is expected to move there in coming weeks.
It’s clear the city has made pothole patching and repaving a priority, and that seems to have yielded some progress. Gov. David Ige, however, needs his Transportation Department to divulge to taxpaying motorists what they’re getting for their money, and the range of strategies for repairing and preserving roadways in Oahu’s pothole paradise.
