Union City Roads in Good Shape, Says New Report

Local drivers don’t need to worry about spilling hot coffee on their daily commute.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), a group that oversees Bay Area transportation planning and financing, recently completed a report detailing pavement conditions in the Bay Area. The MTC ranks road conditions of each city on a scale of one to 100 and assigns it a "pavement condition index."

Union City and Livermore share honors for some of the highest ranked roadways in Alameda County with a score of 78 each on the PCI, just below Dublin, which earned an 82.

The report cites Oakland as having the worst road conditions in Alameda County with a 56.

The Bay Area region as a whole earned a 66, still far from the MTC's Transportation 2035 goal of 75 points. Reaching that goal would require a combined investment of $25 billion, which is almost three times the amount currently spent on Bay Area road maintenance, according to the MTC report. 

Union City ranks higher than Fremont, which earned a 64 on MTC’s PCI scale. Hayward received 69 points. Union City’s PCI score rose two points since the 2009 report.

According to Mintze Cheng, director of Public Works, Union City establishes what roadways need to be repaired using software from MTC.

“We report the street conditions and a computer-generated rating system tells us how good or how bad our road conditions are,” Cheng said.

She said residential streets are typically treated every five years and arterial streets (main thoroughfares) every two years.

Union City typically uses $1.5 million of its capital funds for residential roadway repairs. Arterial roads are funded by revenue brought in by state taxes and federal funds, leveraged by the city’s own roadway funds, Cheng said.

The city currently has $2.4 million for future road repairs from state gas tax, sales tax and federal grants, with a majority of funding from the Measure B quarter-cent sales tax, which was approved by Alameda County voters in 2000.

The MTA also reported that frequent minor treatment of pavement versus major repair projects can save municipalities money, and because fewer materials would need to be shipped from place to place, the environmental cost would be less.

The report says that a city that spends $1 to complete a minor repair would have to spend $5 to perform a major repair later.

Cheng said that Union City has taken the minor rehabilitation approach.

“We saw that investing money in good streets paid off in the long run,” Cheng said.