Schenectady's roads in critical condition

On just one day this spring, four drivers hit potholes and ripped their tires apart on city roads.

And that’s just the drivers who called AAA Northway.

Mechanics report that they’re repairing more strut and shock damage, and the city engineer said the roads are so bad that they may be increasing residents’ cost of car ownership.

“The user costs to your vehicle are going to go up on rougher roads. Even fuel costs are going to be higher,” City Engineer Paul Cassillo said.

It has been a bruising spring in Schenectady. And finally, there are ratings to support the repeated complaints from residents who say more and more of the city’s roads are riddled with cracks, studded with potholes and eroding at the edges.

Cassillo drove about a third of the city’s roads this spring, rating them and designing plans to fix them. What he found was that the city’s roads aren’t just in bad shape — they’re about to get much, much worse.

In the next three to five years, the number of roads in need of major work will double if nothing is done, he said.

He’s developed a plan that will allow the city to repair those roads quickly, but the new roads won’t last as long as if they had been completely rebuilt. It’s a trade-off that he said must be made because of the severity of the problem.

Of the 53 miles of road he inspected, “about 75 percent of them are in some level of distress,” he said. Twenty percent are in poor condition, meaning they need major work. Another 31 percent are in “fair-minus” condition.

“Which is not good. They’re close to poor,” he said. “If we don’t do anything, we’re going to have another 20 to 30 percent in poor condition. I would estimate in three to five years, 40 percent of the city’s roads will be bad.”

It didn’t happen overnight. Cassillo said a lack of extensive maintenance and repaving over the course of the past two decades brought the city to this point.

“It was 17 to 20 years in the making,” he said.

But now so many streets are so bad that even if the city paves 10 to 12 miles of road every year — up from the current 1.6 miles — the situation will stay bad for a decade.

“I don’t know if we’ll get better. We’ll stop the deterioration, so we won’t get 40 percent bad,” Cassillo said. “In 10 to 12 years, the mains will be OK.” But even then, he said, residential streets will still be “crummy” for a few more years.

That means full relief may well be 15 years away under Cassillo’s plan.

Cheaper fix

The trouble is that paving a street is expensive. With sidewalks and curbs, the rule of thumb is $300,000 a block, Cassillo said.

By skipping the concrete sidewalks and granite curbs and hiring a company that can recycle used asphalt while redoing the top layer of the road, Cassillo thinks he can do whole streets for $160,000 each. But not all streets are eligible for the cheaper fix — among other things, it can’t be used if the base of the road needs to be rebuilt.

Cassillo wants to hire specialists who can perform hot-in-place asphalt recycling. In essence, they will mill an inch off the top of the road, put hot asphalt mixed with the millings down and then add a 6 millimeter polymer overlay.

“It is new pavement,” Cassillo said.

Even though less than 2 inches of new pavement are added to the road, it does work, said Patrick Faster, the vice president of the Asphalt Recycling and Reclaiming Association. His company, Gallagher Asphalt, urges municipalities to consider it instead of canceling or scaling back road projects. The company touts it as a way to affordably repair many roads.

It’s cheaper because the city doesn’t have to buy tons of asphalt — most of it is reused after being reheated to 300 degrees. Oil is added to replace the depleted oil in the old asphalt.

“What happens to asphalt over time is it loses its elasticity,” Faster said. “It’s like the engine oil in your car.”

The oil contracts and expands with the weather. Once that oil starts to degrade, the road becomes brittle. Cracks start to form.

“That’s the beginning of the end,” Faster said. “Primarily what roads need is the liquid put back in it.”

It only works if the road base is in good shape. And it doesn’t eliminate cracks forever. Cracks that form from below and stretch up to the surface will be removed — but only as far as the pavement is milled.

“If I’m working at a 2-inch depth, I’m going to buy you some time before they rear their ugly head again,” Faster said. His program tends to give roads another 10 to 12 years of life.

Cassillo intends to go only 1 inch deep.

“He’s cutting corners,” Faster said. “But he’s buying time.”

Faster recommends a 2-inch depth, followed by a 1.5 inch overlay. Cassillo is doing about half of that.

“That’s going to buy you less time,” Faster said. “But budgets drive this. It’s approximately the same cost (to go 2 inches deep), but the contractor gets to go faster if he goes 1 inch deep.”

Bang for the buck

The system has been used in Schenectady at least once. Grand Boulevard was redone with it more than 20 years ago, although it’s unclear how deep the contractors went. A computer crash erased most of the city’s road records before 2006.

Still, Cassillo knows it lasted quite a while. “It lasted 15 to 20 years,” Cassillo said.

But no one ever came back to do it again.

“Now Grand Boulevard needs work,” Cassillo said. “But they didn’t make it into my program.”

To get the biggest impact for his limited funds, he picked streets with heavy traffic. That meant he had to leave out many residential areas.

“Take Randolph Road — it’s atrocious. It’s just awful. But it doesn’t get much traffic. And I’ve got so many bad roads,” he said.

Unfortunately, a large chunk of this year’s budget must go to rebuilding one road down to the foundation. Seward Place, which city workers rebuilt just 10 years ago, needs a complete rebuild, Cassillo said.

“I’m not sure what happened there,” he said. “Either they didn’t put down enough asphalt or they ran out of money. Either way, I’ve got a total base failure.”

It will cost $500,000 to $600,000 to redo the three-block street by Union College. For the same amount of money, he could have redone about three and a half other streets.

“But I can’t let Seward go, not in good conscience,” he said. “It’s a major road. It’s a bus route. It gets 5,000 cars a day. And it’s falling apart.”

Cassillo is also changing the way utilities pave the city’s streets. Cuts from National Grid and Verizon have sometimes led to gaping potholes in nearly new roads. Cassillo wrote new specifications describing precisely how compact the road material must be and how the top coat should be installed, among other details.

National Grid spokeswoman Virginia Limmiatis said the company isn’t going to object to the requirements.

“Well, first of all, it’s a requirement,” she said. “And we want to make sure that we restore these roads to good working condition.”

It’s too early to tell how much more expensive — if at all — the requirements will be, she said.