BUMPY ROADS PROVE COSTLY FOR ANGELENOS REPORT: DRIVERS PAY TWICE NATIONAL AVERAGE IN UPKEEP.

Byline: HARRISON SHEPPARD Sacramento Bureau

SACRAMENTO -- Angelenos already deal with some of the worst traffic in the country, but a new report says the region's roads also are among the bumpiest.

And all that idling in traffic and hitting pits, bumps and potholes is costing drivers an extra $693 a year in vehicle maintenance -- nearly twice the national average, according to the report released today by The Road Improvement Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit.

That ranks the Los Angeles area second-worst in the country, behind only San Jose.

``The bottom line is the rougher the roads, the quicker vehicles fall apart. Unfortunately, the roads in the Los Angeles area do put a lot of stress on vehicles, to say nothing of the drivers,'' said Frank Moretti, the organization's director of policy and research.

And L.A. area roads have gotten worse since the group's report last year, when the city was ranked fourth-worst and drivers forked out an average $671 a year for maintenance.

Nationally, rough roads cost the average driver $383 in maintenance.

Los Angeles officials note decades of underfunding have led to the poor road conditions.

``That's nothing new,'' said Bill Robertson, director of the Los Angeles city Bureau of Street Services.

Robertson said the city's own internal system ranks its streets about a C-minus grade, heading soon into D territory.

``When you look historically at the city of Los Angeles and its street infrastructure, since the end of World War II, it has been a steady deterioration of the overall street system due to a lack of funding,'' he said.

The city has about 6,500 miles of streets, he said. Of that, about 1,000 miles are in failed condition and another 3,100 need some additional maintenance, he said.

To catch up to the backlog, the city would have to spend about $150 million a year for resurfacing over the next 10 years -- or about double the current spending, he said.

The Bureau of Street Services has been trying to compensate by using technology to stretch out the life of the streets.

For example, a few years ago the city began using rubberized slurry seal, which adds a few extra years to the life of a deteriorating street at a fraction of the cost of repaving.

Repaving a deteriorated street can cost up to $350,000 per mile, but slurry seal only costs about $30,000 per mile. Full reconstruction of a failed street costs about $600,000 a mile.

The November statewide ballot contains a $19.9 billion transportation bond that would provide some money to local governments for street repaving, among other projects.

Paul Hefner, a spokesman for the pro-bond panel, said the Los Angeles region would get about $421 million from the portion of the bond dedicated for local cities and counties. Local governments can spend that money in a variety of ways, including street resurfacing, he said.

``There's no doubt that the Rebuild California plan is the best vehicle available to make a real difference in both the safety of the roads that we have -- improving and restoring the roads we have -- as well as doing some of the necessary expansions that we need on adding new lanes on the freeways,'' Hefner said.

In its report, The Road Improvement Project used data that Caltrans collected and reported to the federal government using monitors that measure the vibrations of the road. The Project compared the data with studies on human tolerance on road vibrations.

The group -- funded by businesses involved in road building as well as insurance companies, labor unions and equipment manufacturers -- said about two-thirds of the roads in both Los Angeles and San Jose are in unacceptable condition.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority found in a study several years ago that major surface streets in the greater Los Angeles area were facing a backlog of $936 million in maintenance work, while the local residential streets were facing almost $1billion in work, MTA spokesman Marc Littman said.

``It comes as no surprise that Los Angeles (almost) leads the nation given we have such a serious backlog of just getting the streets and arterials up to an acceptable level of maintenance, let alone maintaining them each year,'' Littman said.

harrison.sheppard(at)dailynews.com

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ROUGH ROADS

SOURCE: The Road Improvement Project

*pre-Hurricane Katrina