Did you tell the city about a pothole this year? There’s a 72% chance it got fixed
Kansas City officials are celebrating a milestone in roadwork: 600 miles of city streets resurfaced in the past 18 months. City Manager Brian Platt took to Twitter last week to share the news.
“This is 10% of all of our streets in Kansas City and more than we did in the previous 4 years combined,” Platt wrote. His message was accompanied by a video of Public Works employees resurfacing the right lane of Linwood Boulevard where it intersects with Brooklyn Avenue in midtown.
Road resurfacing has been a public works priority in recent years, as the city struggles to keep up with reports of road damage from potholes to cracks and patches caused by utility construction projects.
Is resurfacing improving Kansas City roads?
Resurfacing is more expensive than a simple pothole patch, and requires the city to hire outside contractors with sophisticated machinery. But the repair lasts longer than filling in problem areas with asphalt, and can resolve many more potholes at once than patching can.
The city’s recent landmark of 600 miles in 18 months signals a rate of 400 miles resurfaced per year. At this speed, the city’s total of around 6,000 miles of roads would take 15 years to resurface entirely.
“It is clear the nearly $40 million dollars of street preservation funding approved by the City Council in May is going to use,” wrote city spokesperson Sherae Honeycutt in a message to The Star.
“Keeping on this trajectory, roads will noticeably improve over the next few years. For many, they are already experiencing smoother, safer, newly paved roadways.”
A May report by The Star found that most of the city’s resurfacing destinations are chosen up to a year in advance by an algorithm that claims to account for street quality, traffic levels and other factors while also avoiding conflicts with utility companies’ planned excavation — a major source of road damage in the metro.
In March of 2021, the city set an initial goal of resurfacing 100 lane-miles of streets in the metro. A graphic on the Public Works Department’s website advertises “300 lane miles planned for resurfacing.” Honeycutt told The Star that the recent 600 miles resurfaced is “nearly 20 more miles than promised,” although it’s unclear what promise this refers to.
Each week’s resurfacing schedule is publicly available on the city’s website, but some residents are still unsatisfied with the city’s progress on road repair.
“Overall, there is a slight improvement in the city response to our failed roadways,” said Frank Sereno, Jr, a Waldo activist who has been pushing the city to take action on potholes and other road damage for three and a half years. However, he noted that roads in his neighborhood have been slow to improve.
“Waldo arterial streets remain in poor to failed condition,” he said. “Efforts on the 75th street and Wornall Rd project seem to have stalled. There has been very little improvement since a promised late summer 2022 start.”
How many potholes has the city filled this year?
Pothole patching is a quicker and cheaper fix to road damage than a full resurfacing, but the repair doesn’t last as long. While roads with many potholes may be candidates for resurfacing, individual potholes are more likely to be fixed with an asphalt patch.
City data shows that around 72% of pothole complaints filed with 311 this year have been resolved as of Nov. 15. That’s 5,851 complaints out of a total of 8,121.
Some of these complaints may have been regarding the same pothole, while others may have informed the city of multiple potholes. Honeycutt told The Star that this year so far, “the City filled nearly three and a half times more potholes than were reported” for a total of 32,767 potholes filled. She added that the city does not maintain an open-source database of the actual number of individual potholes it fills.
The graph below shows the percentage of complaints filed during each month of 2022 so far that the city says have been resolved.
“My recent 311 reports confirm the City is taking 60+ days to address potholes in my Waldo neighborhood,” Sereno told The Star. According to the city’s data, it took an average of 36 days to resolve a pothole complaint for the cases that have been resolved in 2022 as of Nov. 15.
You can request road repairs in your area by calling 311, using the city’s online 311 reporting system or using one of these other methods.
Do you have more questions about public works in Kansas City? Ask the Service Journalism team at kcq@kcstar.com.
This story was originally published December 1, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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