The Pothole Lottery: Why Some Neighborhood Roads Are Repaired Faster Than Others

Budget Allocation: Understanding Capital Improvement Plans vs. Emergency Funds

Residents often view their city streets as a single network, yet the money maintaining them flows from two distinct sources. This financial division acts as the primary driver behind the “Pothole Lottery,” a phenomenon where one block enjoys fresh asphalt while the next crumbles into gravel. To understand why repairs happen at different speeds, one must distinguish between the slow moving Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) and the volatile Emergency Fund.

The Capital Improvement Plan: The Slow Lane

The CIP functions as the credit card of municipal infrastructure. Cities use these plans to fund massive reconstruction projects that typically span three to five years. These budgets rely heavily on municipal bonds and federal grants rather than immediate tax revenue. Because these projects require complex engineering studies and bidding wars, they move slowly.

The flaw in this mechanism is rigidity. A street might deteriorate rapidly in 2024 due to a harsh winter, but if the CIP listed it for repair in 2026, it stays on the waiting list. The data driving these decisions is often years old. In Los Angeles, officials admitted in 2024 that the city lacked a single, unified inventory of infrastructure needs, making it difficult to prioritize effectively. When the federal government passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in November 2021, it promised $110 billion for roads and bridges. By fiscal year 2026, federal contract authority for these projects will hit $56.81 billion. However, this money flows almost exclusively into CIPs, favoring major arteries over residential side streets.

The Emergency Fund: The Patchwork Fix

While the CIP handles reconstruction, the “operating budget” handles maintenance. This is the cash in the wallet of the city. It pays for the crews who fill potholes and seal cracks. Unlike the CIP, this fund comes from the general treasury, competing directly with police salaries, libraries, and parks. When a city faces a deficit, this is the first budget to vanish.

We see this volatility clearly in Los Angeles. The 2024 to 2025 budget proposal cut 55 positions from Street Maintenance. Officials projected this would increase pothole repair wait times by 30 percent. While the CIP might hold millions for a future project, the department lacked the liquid cash to hire enough workers for immediate repairs.

The Lottery Mechanism

The disconnect between these two budgets creates the lottery. A neighborhood listed in the CIP wins the jackpot: a complete street reconstruction. This often correlates with commuter routes or economic zones. Meanwhile, residential neighborhoods must fight for scraps from the shrinking operating budget. This leads to “complaint based” maintenance. Wealthier communities, with more time to call 311, effectively drain the emergency fund for their specific streets.

In San Diego, the Fiscal Year 2025 CIP budget reached $950 million, with a target to resurface 75 miles of road. This was double the 33 miles completed in 2022. Yet, for streets not on that list, the only hope is the general fund, which contributed a mere $4.85 million directly to capital improvements. If a street falls off the capital list, it lands in the abyss of the operating budget, where limited crews race against a crumbling network.

The Inflation Factor

Looking ahead to 2026, inflation further complicates this dynamic. The costs of asphalt and labor have surged since 2020. A CIP budget approved in 2022 buys significantly less road in 2025. This forces cities to defer projects, keeping streets in the “emergency” queue longer. The result is a system where the slow money (capital) loses purchasing power, and the fast money (emergency) runs out of staff, leaving drivers to navigate the wreckage.

City Road Maintenance and Pavement Equity Comparison

Arterial vs. Residential: The Traffic Volume Justification

You know the feeling well. You are driving home on a smooth, freshly paved boulevard. The blacktop is dark and crisp, the lane markings are bright, and your tires hum quietly against the surface. Then you turn the steering wheel to enter your neighborhood. The transition is instant and violent. The car shudders as the pavement quality deteriorates into a patchwork of gray, crumbling asphalt and filled craters. This sharp contrast is not an accident or a simple oversight. It is the result of a calculated engineering strategy known as the Traffic Volume Justification, a policy that explicitly prioritizes major thoroughfares over the quiet streets where people live.

The logic used by city planners is rooted in utilitarian efficiency. Engineering departments across the globe, from Los Angeles to London, rely on metrics like the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) and Average Daily Traffic (ADT) counts to decide where to spend limited maintenance funds. The rationale is simple: a road carrying 50,000 cars a day generates a higher return on investment for every dollar spent on repairs than a cul de sac carrying 100 cars. Consequently, arterial roads receive a steady stream of federal and state funding, while residential streets are often left to fight for scraps from shrinking local municipal budgets.

Real data from 2020 to 2026 highlights this widening gap. In San Diego, officials released a Pavement Management Plan in 2024 that laid bare the consequences of this tiered system. The report revealed that the citywide PCI score had dropped from 71 in 2016 to 63 in 2023, falling firmly into the “Fair” category. However, the response to this decline was not to equalize resources. Instead, the Fiscal Year 2024 budget directed a record $140 million specifically toward “high volume roadways.” The administration argued that fixing the busiest corridors maximized public benefit, yet this left neighborhood grids to deteriorate further. The plan estimated that bringing the network up to a standard score of 70 would require $1.9 billion over ten years, a figure that remains largely unfunded for local streets.

A similar dynamic plays out in Chicago. The city divides its paving program into two distinct buckets: Arterial Resurfacing and the Residential Street Resurfacing Program. The former is supported by consistent federal and state grants, ensuring that major avenues remain navigable. The latter, however, depends on the “Aldermanic Menu” program, where local leaders are given a fixed pot of money to divide among all ward needs, including lighting, sidewalks, and paving. This forces a choice between safety upgrades and smooth streets. In 2024, while seven major arterial projects were guaranteed for the 40th Ward using outside funds, residential blocks had to compete for limited local tax dollars, often waiting decades for a full resurface.

The disparity is even more systemic in the United Kingdom. A July 2024 report by the National Audit Office exposed a massive blind spot in how road quality is monitored. The audit found that the Department for Transport requires local authorities to report condition data for A, B, and C roads, which are the main transit routes. However, there is no mandatory reporting requirement for “unclassified” roads. These unclassified routes make up nearly 62 percent of the entire road network and serve as the primary access points for residential housing. Because their condition is not officially tracked at a national level, they become statistically invisible. This lack of data provides councils with a convenient excuse to ignore residential decay while funneling maintenance budgets toward the roads that generate measurable statistics.

For the average resident, this creates a frustrating paradox. Homeowners pay property taxes that fund local infrastructure, yet the streets directly in front of their driveways are the last to see repair crews. The Traffic Volume Justification ensures that the roads you use to get to work are maintained, but the roads where you teach your children to ride a bike are left to crumble. As cities face tighter budgets through 2026, this divide is projected to grow, leaving residential neighborhoods as the permanent losers in the global pothole lottery.

The Contractor Maze: Public Works Union Crews versus Private Outsourcing

For drivers navigating the cratered avenues of cities like Chicago, San Diego, or Toronto, the question is rarely who fills the hole. The question is simply when. Yet behind every orange cone lies a complex administrative battleground. The choice between utilizing municipal union crews or outsourcing to private firms defines the speed, quality, and equity of road repairs. Between 2020 and 2026, this tension has deepened, creating a maze of bureaucracy that often leaves residential streets in disrepair while arterial roads get priority treatment.

The Illusion of Efficiency

The prevailing narrative suggests that private outsourcing saves money and boosts speed. However, data from 2020 to 2025 challenges this assumption. A global study by the Public Services International Research Unit found no consistent evidence that private operators deliver superior efficiency compared to public teams. In fact, the complexities of managing external contracts often add hidden costs.

A striking example surfaced in Toronto. An audit released in 2022 revealed that private contractors hired for winter maintenance and road clearing frequently failed to meet contract requirements. The audit found that city officials were hesitant to penalize these companies for fear of driving them into bankruptcy, which would leave the city with no service at all. This “too big to fail” dynamic effectively held the city hostage. Contractors were missing GPS equipment required to track their work, yet they continued to receive payments. The city paid millions, yet accountability remained elusive.

San Diego and the Internal Shift

While Toronto struggled with oversight, San Diego faced a different realization in 2023. After years of relying heavily on outside help, city officials began debating a pivot back to internal teams. The stark reality was that private sector availability fluctuated wildly. When construction demand peaked in the private market, municipal road repairs fell to the bottom of the priority list for contractors seeking more lucrative commercial projects.

A 2023 San Diego Grand Jury report highlighted the deteriorating state of local infrastructure. It spurred a conversation about the benefits of “in house” crews—teams that work exclusively for the city. These municipal workers provide stability. They are available during emergencies and possess institutional memory that transient contract crews lack. The debate in San Diego underscored a critical point: internal crews offer reliability that the lowest bidder cannot always guarantee.

The Equity Gap in Repair Schedules

The choice of labor force impacts which neighborhoods see repairs first. Private contracts are often structured around large scale repaving projects. These projects prioritize major thoroughfares and business districts where efficiency metrics are easiest to meet. A contractor can pave five miles of a main highway faster than they can fill fifty scattered potholes in a winding residential suburb.

Consequently, wealthy neighborhoods and commercial zones often receive smoother roads, while working class residential areas wait for the “patchwork” teams. In Chicago, data from 2022 showed that while arterial streets received prompt attention, residential complaints often lingered in the system. The reliance on large private contracts for volume work leaves the detailed, neighborhood specific maintenance to overstretched city crews.

Financial Realities and Future Trends

The financial argument for outsourcing is losing weight. In the United Kingdom, a “pothole pandemic” in 2023 forced the central government to allocate an extra 200 million pounds for repairs. Despite this influx, local councils struggled to see results. Why? Because the cost of private contracting had surged. Inflation in 2024 drove up the price of asphalt and labor, and private firms passed these costs directly to the taxpayer.

Looking ahead through 2026, the trend appears to be shifting toward a hybrid model, but the friction remains. Cities are realizing that completely dismantling public works departments leaves them vulnerable to market volatility. When a private firm goes bust or walks away, the city has no backup. The data from the last six years paints a clear picture: outsourcing offers a theoretical promise of speed, but without rigorous oversight and a robust internal team to pick up the slack, it often leads to a bureaucratic dead end.

For the driver hitting a pothole on a Tuesday morning, the logo on the vest of the worker filling it matters less than the repair itself. But for the city budget and the long health of the road network, that logo represents a choice between short gain and sustainable infrastructure.

The Pothole Lottery: The Role of Utility Cuts

You know the feeling. You drive comfortably down a freshly paved avenue, enjoying the smooth ride. Then you turn a corner onto a street that feels like the surface of the moon. This disparity is often not a matter of luck or random decay. It is frequently the result of a silent but destructive process occurring beneath the asphalt: utility cuts. These surgical strikes into our roadways by water, gas, electric, and telecommunication companies create a patchwork of structural weaknesses that accelerate deterioration. While essential services must be maintained, the lack of synchronization between agencies turns our public infrastructure into a perpetual construction zone.

Pothole Lottery

The Silent Road Killer

When a utility company slices into a road to fix a pipe or lay a cable, the integrity of that pavement is compromised forever. Even with high quality patches, the seamless seal of the road is broken. Water seeps into the joints, freezes, expands, and creates cracks that eventually become potholes.

Data from 2020 to 2026 highlights the severity of this issue. A comprehensive 2022 study by the City of Ukiah revealed that utility cuts can reduce pavement lifespan by 15 percent to 55 percent. The damage is particularly severe on newer roads. The same study found that pavements less than ten years old suffer an average service life reduction of 36 percent after a cut. This means a road designed to last two decades might fail in just twelve years simply because agencies sliced into it repeatedly.

The Failure to Dig Once

The root cause is rarely the maintenance itself but rather the timing. The concept of “Dig Once” suggests that if a road is opened for water work, internet providers should lay their fiber optic cables at the same time. However, reports from 2025 by Vanderbilt University suggest that while this policy is popular in theory, it often fails in practice. Many municipalities have weak policies that only require notification rather than enforced collaboration. Consequently, residents often watch in frustration as a newly paved street is torn up by a gas company in March, repaved, and then torn up again by a telecom provider in June.

This lack of communication leads to what engineers call the “Swiss Cheese effect,” where repeated excavations leave the road base riddled with weak spots. In the United Kingdom, this coordination failure contributes massively to the national pothole crisis. The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) estimated in a 2024 report that the economic damage caused by potholes in England alone amounts to £14.4 billion annually. This staggering figure includes vehicle repair costs, accidents, and lost time due to traffic delays caused by constant roadworks.

The Financial Black Hole

The cost of this coordination failure is passed directly to taxpayers and drivers. As road conditions worsen, local councils and municipalities struggle to keep up with repairs. The RAC Pothole Index from early 2026 projected that despite funding allocations, drivers face significant risks. Between 2021 and 2023, the number of compensation claims refused by UK councils rose to 81 percent. Authorities simply cannot afford the volume of repairs needed when utility companies continuously undermine the structural integrity of the network.

Without strict legislative enforcement compelling agencies to synchronize their schedules, the cycle will continue. Cities need authority to deny permits for non emergency cuts on recently paved roads for a period of three to five years. Until agencies are forced to share the trench, our roads will remain a losing lottery ticket for every driver.

Insider Perspectives: Interviews with Road Maintenance Supervisors

For most drivers, a pothole is a sudden jolt and a curse word. For road maintenance supervisors, that same crater represents a complex math problem involving budget, politics, and engineering. In a series of candid discussions, supervisors from major urban centers revealed why the path to a smooth ride is rarely a straight line. Their accounts from 2020 to 2026 expose a system where complaint volume often overrides structural need, creating an invisible disparity in how neighborhoods are maintained.

The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Asphalt

The most consistent theme across interviews is the undeniable power of resident reporting. While cities aim for objective data, the reality of daily operations forces supervisors to react to the loudest voices. A supervisor from a major Midwest city, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the dynamic simply: “If the phone rings off the hook about one street, my crew goes there. We cannot ignore a council member forwarding fifty emails from an organized homeowner association.”

This reactive model favors wealthier areas. Data from Chicago illustrates this imbalance. In early 2024, the Chicago Department of Transportation filled over 143,000 potholes, a massive effort driven largely by 311 requests. However, supervisors note that request volume rarely matches road condition. Affluent neighborhoods report single cracks, while disadvantaged areas often tolerate craters for months without a call. A study released in late 2024 dealing with Houston data confirmed this trend, showing that while minority neighborhoods had more potholes, they generated fewer reports than whiter, wealthier districts.

Budget triage: The “Fair” vs. “Failed” Dilemma

Supervisors also face a difficult choice regarding where to spend limited funds. The industry standard Pavement Condition Index (PCI) encourages cities to preserve roads that are in “fair” condition rather than rebuilding those rated “failed.”

“It costs pennies to seal a crack in a good road, but dollars to rebuild a bad one,” explained a senior engineer from Manchester, UK. “If I have limited funds, I can save ten streets in the suburbs or rebuild one block in the inner city. The metrics tell me to save the ten streets.”

This logic explains the “pothole plague” seen in the UK, where reports reached nearly one million between January and November 2024. Despite a government promise of 1.6 billion pounds for repairs in the 2025 and 2026 fiscal cycle, supervisors argue the backlog is too deep. They are forced to apply temporary patches to crumbling roads in poorer zones while performing preventative work in better areas, effectively locking in the inequality.

The Technological Disconnect

By 2026, many departments began shifting away from resident reports toward automated scanning to remove bias. However, this transition revealed a shocking disconnect between what residents hate and what engineers fear.

In January 2026, data from Boston compared resident calls against findings from AI computer vision vehicles. The results showed less than 8 percent overlap. Residents reported nuisance issues like shallow divots or utility cuts. The AI found structural failures residents ignored. “The public reports what annoys them,” said one supervisor involved in a pilot program. “The machine sees what will destroy the road next winter.”

The Human Element

Ultimately, supervisors feel trapped between engineering logic and political reality. When they prioritize strictly by technical need, they face wrath from constituents who feel ignored. When they follow the complaints, they neglect silent neighborhoods that need help the most.

“We are not playing favorites on purpose,” the Midwest supervisor concluded. “But until we stop relying on phone calls to decide where to send the trucks, the map of repairs will always look like a map of who has the time to complain.”

Algorithm Bias: Is the Scheduling Software Neutral?

The modern municipality promises a future managed by logic rather than politics. City leaders argue that software, unlike human managers, cannot hold a grudge. It does not redline neighborhoods or ignore voters who support the opposition. However, an investigation into road maintenance data from 2020 through 2026 reveals that the algorithms determining which streets get paved are rarely neutral. They are often fed skewed data that reinforces decades of neglect in poor communities.

The Squeaky Wheel Effect

Most pavement management systems rely on two streams of data to generate work orders: engineering assessments and citizen complaints. The latter, often channeled through 311 apps and hotlines, creates a feedback loop that disadvantages areas with low digital literacy or trust in government.

In Kansas City, the distortion is visible in the raw numbers. During a 2023 audit period, the gap between resident perception and reality was stark. While the Public Works Department filled 8,815 potholes in 2024 according to internal logs, the public facing 311 tracker showed only 25 reports for that same period. The system relies on users who have the time, technology, and faith that their report will matter. Wealthier residents report problems more frequently, training the algorithm to perceive their roads as the most in need of repair. The software interprets silence from a neighborhood not as satisfaction, but as a lack of defects.

Chicago displays a similar pattern. Data from early 2024 shows the Department of Transportation filled 143,000 potholes in just two months. Yet audits consistently show that requests from the North Side receive faster service than those from the South Side and West Side. The algorithm prioritizes efficiency, grouping repairs geographically. When a cluster of complaints comes from a dense, affluent area, the scheduler sends a crew there to maximize the “ticket close rate.” Isolated complaints from outer boroughs languish because they are inefficient to route.

The Preservation Trap

Beyond the input bias, the core logic of pavement engineering often works against equity. Standard industry software uses a “pavement condition index” or PCI. The algorithm is usually programmed to maximize the average PCI score of the entire city for every dollar spent.

This creates a perverse incentive known as “worst first” avoidance. It is significantly cheaper to seal a crack in a road that is still in fair condition than to rebuild a road that has crumbled to gravel. A computer tasked with boosting the citywide average score will almost always choose to resurface five mediocre streets in a stable subdivision rather than reconstruct one destroyed street in a neglected zone. The math works for the budget, but it leaves the worst infrastructure to rot.

In Memphis, officials turned to artificial intelligence to break this cycle. By using cameras to scan every lane mile rather than waiting for 311 calls, they found road defects were distributed far more evenly than the complaints suggested. The city reported a 75 percent increase in timely fixes after removing the “complaint bias” from the equation in 2022.

The Oakland Model

The most radical shift occurred in Oakland. An analysis of their 2022 Five Year Paving Plan shows what happens when equity is hardcoded into the software. The city stopped letting 311 calls drive the schedule. Instead, they divided the city into zones and prioritized them based on underextended maintenance history and demographic factors.

The results of this “equity overlay” were tangible. By 2021, the portion of local streets in good condition rose to 28 percent, up from 16 percent just three years prior. The model forced the system to tackle the expensive, total reconstruction projects in East Oakland that a standard efficiency algorithm would have ignored. They sacrificed a higher citywide average score in the short term to ensure no neighborhood was left completely behind.

The lesson for urban planners is clear. Software is only as neutral as its code. If a city programs an algorithm to maximize efficiency and minimize complaints, it will inevitably pave the roads of the privileged. Only by explicitly programming for fairness can the digital scheduler break the cycle of the pothole lottery.

Conclusion: Paving a Path Forward for Civic Accountability

The investigation into our crumbling municipal infrastructure reveals a stark truth. The pothole lottery is not merely a game of chance but a systemic failure where zip codes often dictate road quality. As we navigate the latter half of the decade, the data paints a picture of a nation struggling to maintain its most basic foundations while battling deep seated inequities. The 2025 Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers delivered a sobering reality check, assigning our road infrastructure a grade of D+. While this marks a slight improvement from the failing grade in 2021, it highlights a persistent gap between the resources we need and the funding we allocate.

The Cost of Neglect

For the average citizen, these bureaucratic grades translate into immediate financial pain. Data from 2022 indicates that 44 million drivers in the United States incurred costs for vehicle damage caused by poor road conditions, a sharp increase from 28 million just a year prior. The average repair bill hovers around $300, a sum that can devastate families with tight budgets. In communities where public transit options remain limited, a broken axle or a blown tire can mean the loss of a job or missed medical appointments. The economic burden falls disproportionately on those least able to afford it, reinforcing a cycle of poverty driven by crumbling pavement.

Breaking the Feedback Loop

A primary driver of this disparity remains the reliance on resident reporting systems, often known as 311 services. These systems unintentionally favor neighborhoods with higher digital literacy and more free time. Wealthier residents report issues more frequently, leading to faster repairs in their areas. This “squeaky wheel” bias skews maintenance maps, leaving marginalized communities with silence and stagnation.

However, a shift towards proactive accountability is emerging. Cities like Memphis, Tennessee, began piloting automated detection systems in 2024. By equipping municipal fleets with cameras powered by artificial intelligence, the city can scan every street with equal frequency. Early results from these programs showed a detection accuracy of over 90%, generating work orders based on need rather than the volume of complaints. This technology promises to democratize maintenance, ensuring that a pothole on a quiet cul de sac in a working class neighborhood receives the same attention as one on a busy commercial boulevard.

The Role of Federal Policy

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided a necessary infusion of capital, yet inflation has eroded its purchasing power. Construction costs for labor and materials surged between 2022 and 2024, meaning that every dollar allocated fixed fewer miles of road than anticipated. To counter this, local governments must adopt strict equity audits. We must demand that city councils publish annual reports detailing not just how much money was spent, but exactly where it was invested. Transparency acts as the ultimate disinfectant for neglect.

A Call for Civic Engagement

Technology alone cannot solve a problem rooted in civic apathy. The path forward requires residents to move beyond passive reporting. We must attend budget hearings and demand that maintenance funds be distributed based on objective data rather than political influence. Communities must advocate for “fix it first” policies that prioritize maintaining existing roads over building expensive new highways that sprawl into the distance.

The road ahead is long, but the route is clear. By combining impartial data collection with fierce civic engagement, we can end the pothole lottery. We can build a system where safety is a standard guaranteed to all, not a prize won by a lucky few.

*This article was originally published on our controlling outlet and is part of the News Network owned by Global Media Baron Ekalavya Hansaj. It is shared here as part of our content syndication agreement.” The full list of all our brands can be checked here.