Oakland reports repairing nearly 60,000 potholes a year. An analysis of 311 requests shows why that number doesn't necessarily match what residents experience on their streets.
Josh, thank you for your remarks and insight, but it would be good to know your thoughts on how Oakland’s low PCI ratings (which were in the “At Risk” range for a couple decades through 2023) contribute to the increased number of potholes. You mention water intrusion as a cause (even invoking the underground water table), but not the deleterious effects of sustained deferred maintenance.
From 2005 to 2023, Oakland’s average PCI rating consistently fell within the “At Risk” range between 50 to 59 — a condition in which rapid road deterioration takes hold, and is far more difficult and costly to correct.
By comparison, in 2023 most other Alameda County cities had PCI ratings between 70 and 79 — in the “Satisfactory” range. Alameda County as a whole had an average PCI rating of 67 — in the “Fair” range.
Meanwhile in neighboring Orinda: Back in 2012, Orinda’s PCI rating was even worse than Oakland’s at a dismal 48 — in the “Poor” range. But a decade later in 2023, Orinda’s PCI rating had vastly improved to 84 — in the “Good” range.
This was due to a decade of committed and sustained effort by that city to fulfill the promise it made to its voters who approved sales tax and property tax increases to fix Orinda’s public roads.
If Orinda can do it, why can’t Oakland? It can’t just be the difference in median income and tax revenue between the two cities. The City of Orinda’s operating budget is a fraction of Oakland’s.
City budget records and Grand Jury reports make the cause clear. Spin it any way you want, but Oakland politicians stole the road maintenance budget funds year after year to fund their other priorities. The calculation? By the time the disastrous effects are noticed, the responsible politicians are long gone. The only solution is holding politicians accountable, not reelecting them for their ideological purity.
Josh, thank you for your responses, it's good to hear your perspective as Oakland's transportation director. Back to the potholes (the subject of this article), it sounds like you are alluding, but not saying outright, that Oakland's poor record on road maintenance, which has resulted in decades of below-standard pavement conditions, is a contributing factor to its remarkably high number of potholes, and their frequency of occurrence.
For example, the storm water you mention generally causes more damage on roads that are in poor condition than on roads that are kept in good condition. Water gets into the cracks, and the pressure of vehicles passing over compresses the water into the cracks and applies hydraulic forces to crack them open even more.
Thus, the city's decades of deferred maintenance on this core infrastructure responsibility has created a situation that is now costing significantly more taxpayer funding and city resources to remediate -- and a hole that will take the city years to fill, if ever.
I wish to add one more ingredient to time and money, and that is quality. A smooth durable surface should be the goal of any paving project. Many pothole patch jobs deteriorate quickly and result in a jolting ride. This is particularly true of patches done by utilities throughout the city. The ones recently done on my street (3700-4000 blocks of Coolidge Ave.) are particularly poor, resulting in a jolting ride. PG&E and EBMUD and whoever else excavates our streets for needed repairs or updates must be held to higher performance standards than they are presently. The workmanship on these patches is abyssmal and shameful. We deserve better.
Another excellent article. Never forget there are two ingredients when repairing pavement - money and time.
The central complaint of this article is about the feedback residents get from Oak311: what an "open" status means, and why the public record doesn't show inspection, priority or treatment. Those are questions for Oak311. OakDOT is one of several user departments that receive requests through it.
OakDOT's job is the work in the street. On that, your own data shows more than the headline suggests, and other public datasets fill in the rest.
Your numbers show the department working the network, not waiting for complaints. Repairs rose from about 14,000 to more than 58,000 a year while 311 requests rose 16%. Crews now repair more than ten times as many potholes as residents report. Median closure time fell from 319 days for 2024 requests to 28 days for 2026.
Why Oakland has so many potholes. A pothole is the last visible stage of a failure that starts underneath the road. Water gets into the base, the base loses strength, the surface cracks and then breaks apart. Your finding that reports run more than three times higher on the worst-condition streets is consistent with that.
Oakland is especially exposed to it. USGS mapping shows much of the flatlands sits on artificial fill and young alluvium, and the City's Safety Element documents creeks that were culverted and buried to allow development. That ground doesn't make durable pavement impossible. It makes it more expensive: it requires subdrains, a stabilized base, and storm drainage that works. For decades the City didn't pay that cost.
The investment record:
• Paving pace. From 2009 to 2016, Oakland paved about 9 miles a year out of 806 miles of streets. That's roughly a 90-year cycle for asphalt designed to last 25 to 30 years (2024–25 Alameda County Grand Jury).
• Regional and national rank. The San Francisco–Oakland area ranked worst in the nation for road condition in TRIP's 2015 and 2018 national reports. As of August 2026, 74% of its major roads are still poor or mediocre.
• Oakland's score. Oakland's citywide pavement condition index is 60 as of January 2025, the low end of "fair." The Bay Area average is 67 (City of Oakland pavement survey, 2025; MTC). MTC also estimates that major repairs cost 5 to 10 times more than routine maintenance. That multiplier is what decades of deferral cost.
• Drainage. In 2019, Save The Bay warned the Council that the City's own Resilient Oakland Playbook found the storm drain system "in critical need of maintenance, repairs, and upgrades." The Capital Improvement Program still lists failing culverts and pump stations.
• Funding. The FY24 paving record of 47 miles was followed by 18 miles in FY25. The drop came after the July 2024 budget action that cut paving from $51.75 million to $6.75 million (Grand Jury, pp. 30–31). The Grand Jury also found that hiring delays were largely a bottleneck not controlled by DOT.
I’d suggest a serious discussion about water. OPW recently delivered an excellent presentation to PWTC. With climate change and rising sea levels, we should also discuss what a rising water table means to our infrastructure. Spoiler alert. It’s not a good news story.
Josh, thank you for your remarks and insight, but it would be good to know your thoughts on how Oakland’s low PCI ratings — which were in the “At Risk” range for a couple decades through 2023 — contribute to the increased number of potholes. You mention water intrusion as a cause (even invoking the underground water table), but not the deleterious effects of sustained deferred maintenance.
From 2005 to 2023, Oakland’s average PCI rating consistently fell within the “At Risk” range between 50 to 59 — a condition in which rapid road deterioration takes hold, and is far more difficult and costly to correct.
By comparison, in 2023 most other Alameda County cities had PCI ratings between 70 and 79 — in the “Satisfactory” range. Alameda County as a whole had an average PCI rating of 67 — in the “Fair” range.
Meanwhile in neighboring Orinda: Back in 2012, Orinda’s PCI rating was even worse than Oakland’s at a dismal 48 — in the “Poor” range. But a decade later in 2023, Orinda’s PCI rating had vastly improved to 84 — in the “Good” range.
This was due to a decade of committed and sustained effort by that city to fulfill the promise it made to its voters who approved sales tax and property tax increases to fix Orinda’s public roads.
If Orinda can do it, why can’t Oakland? It can’t just be the difference in median income and tax revenue between the two cities. The City of Orinda’s operating budget is a fraction of Oakland’s.
Paving is money and time. Orinda has about 92 miles of road; Oakland has 806, nearly nine times as much. Orinda's entire network is about twice what Oakland paved in its record year, FY24, at 47 miles.
Orinda deserves credit: voters approved dedicated funding, and the city spent it steadily for a decade. Its program also paired paving with storm drain repair, which is the point I was making about water.
Oakland voters made the same commitment with Measure KK in 2016 and Measure U in 2022, and it showed. The citywide PCI reached 60 in January 2025, out of the "at risk" range. Then the FY25 budget action cut paving funding from $51.75 million to $6.75 million, and paving dropped from 47 miles to 18.
On your Alameda County comparison: in 2023, Oakland was at 57, Berkeley 56, San Leandro 56 and Albany 58. The older cities along the bay all score in that range. The 70s belong mostly to newer suburban networks like Livermore, Pleasanton and Dublin.
Oakland can do what Orinda did. It needs uninterrupted funding over a network nine times the size.
Josh, thank you for your comment comparing road miles in Oakland and Orinda, but it elides the fact that the Oakland city organization's size and resources are similarly massive in scale compared to Orinda's.
One final note - the residents of Orinda demanded this 10-year systematic solution; we are talking about potholes and 311 tickets in Oakland. Your article is the proof.
You're right, and it's the point I've been trying to make.
Orinda has about 4.9 miles of road per 1,000 residents. Oakland has 1.8. Each Orinda resident carries almost three times as much road as an Oaklander, a harder problem per person. Orinda fixed it anyway.
Orinda didn't decide to fix potholes. It decided to fix its road system. Voters approved dedicated sales taxes and $45 million in bonds, about $2,400 per resident. The city paired paving with storm drain repair and kept at it for ten years. Its pavement score went from 48 to 84.
Orinda could also afford to make that choice. Per capita income there is $140,621, and 2.2% of residents live in poverty. In Oakland, per capita income is $61,757, and 13.4% live in poverty. Orinda's $2,400 per resident is about 1.7% of a year's per capita income; for an Oaklander it would be 3.9%. More than 9 in 10 Orinda households own their homes, so a parcel tax there falls on owners with substantial equity. Most Oakland households rent. Sales taxes hit lower-income families hardest. Oakland can't ask its residents to pay at Orinda's rate without asking the people with the least to pay the most. That's the main difference between the two cities.
Even so, Oakland voters stepped up. Street bond dollars from Measures KK and U come to about $1,450 per resident, and those dollars also have to cover sidewalks, curb ramps, bikeways and safety projects. Then the FY25 budget action cut paving from $51.75 million to $6.75 million in a single year.
Orinda committed to its system and protected the money. Oakland keeps having the pothole conversation, about 311 tickets, open requests and patch counts. Patching treats symptoms. Paving and drainage, funded steadily over a decade, fix the system. Orinda is an excellent example and had the resources to tax itself.
Oakland also carries loads Orinda doesn't: about 3,000 port trucks a day, AC Transit's busiest lines, four interstates feeding regional traffic onto city streets, a 25-year ADA settlement, and a traffic safety crisis. None of that is a reason Oakland can't do what Orinda did. It's a reason Oakland's commitment has to be steady, protected and fair to the residents paying for it.
Josh, thank you for your responses, it's good to hear your perspective as Oakland's transportation director. Back to the potholes (the subject of this article), it sounds like you are alluding, but not saying outright, that Oakland's poor record on road maintenance, which has resulted in decades of below-standard pavement conditions, is a contributing factor to its remarkably high number of potholes, and their frequency of occurrence.
For example, the storm water you mention generally causes more damage on roads that are in poor condition than on roads that are kept in good condition. Water gets into the cracks, and the pressure of vehicles passing over compresses the water into the cracks and applies hydraulic forces to crack them open even more.
Thus, the city's decades of deferred maintenance on this core infrastructure responsibility has created a situation that is now costing significantly more taxpayer funding and city resources to remediate -- and a hole that will take the city years to fill, if ever.
As an Oaklander and an engineer eating lunch, here's my take. I do not set city policy. In my professional capacity, I influence it. I’m exchanging ideas today.
Oakland has a lot of work to do, but the full picture matters. We're a transportation city: our streets carry loads that aren't our own, we have equity issues that newer suburbs don't face, and we have a port whose importance will only grow as demand for Central Valley agricultural exports increases. On top of that, we're digging out from a pre-2016 era that didn't prioritize maintenance — not just pavement, but storm drainage, trees, and city-owned facilities too. And climate change, sea level rise, and more intense storms are going to hit Oakland harder than they hit Orinda.
I admire Orinda's commitment to a systems solution. I'd like to see that same thinking applied here. Most of what we call "potholes" are really a groundwater problem, and that's only going to get worse. If you care about pavement condition and reducing potholes, the system that actually needs fixing is storm drainage — not just pavement. And from a vehicle perspective, how we handle trucks and buses is its own important policy conversation.
If you could save 5 lives or pave 50 miles (in one year), which one would you choose? I’d love to see a similar article on auto speeding and severe crashes. It was troubling that 58% of speed camera citations were sent to non-Oakland addresses…..I wonder how much traffic in Orinda (auto and truck) is from outside the city. Oakland supports the Bay, arguably the world when factoring for exports. Orinda supports Orinda.
Hi Josh, thank you for your additional comment, but it is a deflection. This article is about potholes, not traffic. On the latter topic, many East Bay cities have traffic that passes through on its way to other destinations (Hayward, Berkeley, Richmond, Piedmont, ad nauseum), just as Oaklanders travel other cities' streets to get to where they need to go.
Thank you again for the engagement and discussion; we appreciate it.
Orinda delivered in ten years, and I'd gladly take ten years of paving at current funding levels. But the two cities aren't working with the same set of obligations.
Orinda maintains about 92 miles of road. Oakland maintains 806.
Oakland is also under a 25-year ADA settlement. It requires about 11,000 curb ramps in the first 15 years, every remaining ramp location brought to standard, and 78,000 sidewalk damage locations fixed within 25 years. That work draws on the same infrastructure dollars as paving.
Oakland also has a traffic safety emergency. We lost 36 people on our streets in 2022, 33 in 2023, 30 in 2024 and 23 in 2025. Safe Oakland Streets projects compete for the same capital funds, and they're saving lives: deaths are down by more than a third since 2022.
Josh, thank you for your remarks and insight, but it would be good to know your thoughts on how Oakland’s low PCI ratings (which were in the “At Risk” range for a couple decades through 2023) contribute to the increased number of potholes. You mention water intrusion as a cause (even invoking the underground water table), but not the deleterious effects of sustained deferred maintenance.
From 2005 to 2023, Oakland’s average PCI rating consistently fell within the “At Risk” range between 50 to 59 — a condition in which rapid road deterioration takes hold, and is far more difficult and costly to correct.
By comparison, in 2023 most other Alameda County cities had PCI ratings between 70 and 79 — in the “Satisfactory” range. Alameda County as a whole had an average PCI rating of 67 — in the “Fair” range.
Meanwhile in neighboring Orinda: Back in 2012, Orinda’s PCI rating was even worse than Oakland’s at a dismal 48 — in the “Poor” range. But a decade later in 2023, Orinda’s PCI rating had vastly improved to 84 — in the “Good” range.
This was due to a decade of committed and sustained effort by that city to fulfill the promise it made to its voters who approved sales tax and property tax increases to fix Orinda’s public roads.
If Orinda can do it, why can’t Oakland? It can’t just be the difference in median income and tax revenue between the two cities. The City of Orinda’s operating budget is a fraction of Oakland’s.
https://www.oaklandreport.org/i/180748397/orinda-leaves-oakland-in-the-dust-on-fixing-potholes
City budget records and Grand Jury reports make the cause clear. Spin it any way you want, but Oakland politicians stole the road maintenance budget funds year after year to fund their other priorities. The calculation? By the time the disastrous effects are noticed, the responsible politicians are long gone. The only solution is holding politicians accountable, not reelecting them for their ideological purity.
Josh, thank you for your responses, it's good to hear your perspective as Oakland's transportation director. Back to the potholes (the subject of this article), it sounds like you are alluding, but not saying outright, that Oakland's poor record on road maintenance, which has resulted in decades of below-standard pavement conditions, is a contributing factor to its remarkably high number of potholes, and their frequency of occurrence.
For example, the storm water you mention generally causes more damage on roads that are in poor condition than on roads that are kept in good condition. Water gets into the cracks, and the pressure of vehicles passing over compresses the water into the cracks and applies hydraulic forces to crack them open even more.
Thus, the city's decades of deferred maintenance on this core infrastructure responsibility has created a situation that is now costing significantly more taxpayer funding and city resources to remediate -- and a hole that will take the city years to fill, if ever.
I wish to add one more ingredient to time and money, and that is quality. A smooth durable surface should be the goal of any paving project. Many pothole patch jobs deteriorate quickly and result in a jolting ride. This is particularly true of patches done by utilities throughout the city. The ones recently done on my street (3700-4000 blocks of Coolidge Ave.) are particularly poor, resulting in a jolting ride. PG&E and EBMUD and whoever else excavates our streets for needed repairs or updates must be held to higher performance standards than they are presently. The workmanship on these patches is abyssmal and shameful. We deserve better.
Another excellent article. Never forget there are two ingredients when repairing pavement - money and time.
The central complaint of this article is about the feedback residents get from Oak311: what an "open" status means, and why the public record doesn't show inspection, priority or treatment. Those are questions for Oak311. OakDOT is one of several user departments that receive requests through it.
OakDOT's job is the work in the street. On that, your own data shows more than the headline suggests, and other public datasets fill in the rest.
Your numbers show the department working the network, not waiting for complaints. Repairs rose from about 14,000 to more than 58,000 a year while 311 requests rose 16%. Crews now repair more than ten times as many potholes as residents report. Median closure time fell from 319 days for 2024 requests to 28 days for 2026.
Why Oakland has so many potholes. A pothole is the last visible stage of a failure that starts underneath the road. Water gets into the base, the base loses strength, the surface cracks and then breaks apart. Your finding that reports run more than three times higher on the worst-condition streets is consistent with that.
Oakland is especially exposed to it. USGS mapping shows much of the flatlands sits on artificial fill and young alluvium, and the City's Safety Element documents creeks that were culverted and buried to allow development. That ground doesn't make durable pavement impossible. It makes it more expensive: it requires subdrains, a stabilized base, and storm drainage that works. For decades the City didn't pay that cost.
The investment record:
• Paving pace. From 2009 to 2016, Oakland paved about 9 miles a year out of 806 miles of streets. That's roughly a 90-year cycle for asphalt designed to last 25 to 30 years (2024–25 Alameda County Grand Jury).
• Regional and national rank. The San Francisco–Oakland area ranked worst in the nation for road condition in TRIP's 2015 and 2018 national reports. As of August 2026, 74% of its major roads are still poor or mediocre.
• Oakland's score. Oakland's citywide pavement condition index is 60 as of January 2025, the low end of "fair." The Bay Area average is 67 (City of Oakland pavement survey, 2025; MTC). MTC also estimates that major repairs cost 5 to 10 times more than routine maintenance. That multiplier is what decades of deferral cost.
• Drainage. In 2019, Save The Bay warned the Council that the City's own Resilient Oakland Playbook found the storm drain system "in critical need of maintenance, repairs, and upgrades." The Capital Improvement Program still lists failing culverts and pump stations.
• Funding. The FY24 paving record of 47 miles was followed by 18 miles in FY25. The drop came after the July 2024 budget action that cut paving from $51.75 million to $6.75 million (Grand Jury, pp. 30–31). The Grand Jury also found that hiring delays were largely a bottleneck not controlled by DOT.
I’d suggest a serious discussion about water. OPW recently delivered an excellent presentation to PWTC. With climate change and rising sea levels, we should also discuss what a rising water table means to our infrastructure. Spoiler alert. It’s not a good news story.
Josh, thank you for your remarks and insight, but it would be good to know your thoughts on how Oakland’s low PCI ratings — which were in the “At Risk” range for a couple decades through 2023 — contribute to the increased number of potholes. You mention water intrusion as a cause (even invoking the underground water table), but not the deleterious effects of sustained deferred maintenance.
From 2005 to 2023, Oakland’s average PCI rating consistently fell within the “At Risk” range between 50 to 59 — a condition in which rapid road deterioration takes hold, and is far more difficult and costly to correct.
By comparison, in 2023 most other Alameda County cities had PCI ratings between 70 and 79 — in the “Satisfactory” range. Alameda County as a whole had an average PCI rating of 67 — in the “Fair” range.
Meanwhile in neighboring Orinda: Back in 2012, Orinda’s PCI rating was even worse than Oakland’s at a dismal 48 — in the “Poor” range. But a decade later in 2023, Orinda’s PCI rating had vastly improved to 84 — in the “Good” range.
This was due to a decade of committed and sustained effort by that city to fulfill the promise it made to its voters who approved sales tax and property tax increases to fix Orinda’s public roads.
If Orinda can do it, why can’t Oakland? It can’t just be the difference in median income and tax revenue between the two cities. The City of Orinda’s operating budget is a fraction of Oakland’s.
https://www.oaklandreport.org/i/180748397/orinda-leaves-oakland-in-the-dust-on-fixing-potholes
Sean,
Paving is money and time. Orinda has about 92 miles of road; Oakland has 806, nearly nine times as much. Orinda's entire network is about twice what Oakland paved in its record year, FY24, at 47 miles.
Orinda deserves credit: voters approved dedicated funding, and the city spent it steadily for a decade. Its program also paired paving with storm drain repair, which is the point I was making about water.
Oakland voters made the same commitment with Measure KK in 2016 and Measure U in 2022, and it showed. The citywide PCI reached 60 in January 2025, out of the "at risk" range. Then the FY25 budget action cut paving funding from $51.75 million to $6.75 million, and paving dropped from 47 miles to 18.
On your Alameda County comparison: in 2023, Oakland was at 57, Berkeley 56, San Leandro 56 and Albany 58. The older cities along the bay all score in that range. The 70s belong mostly to newer suburban networks like Livermore, Pleasanton and Dublin.
Oakland can do what Orinda did. It needs uninterrupted funding over a network nine times the size.
Josh, thank you for your comment comparing road miles in Oakland and Orinda, but it elides the fact that the Oakland city organization's size and resources are similarly massive in scale compared to Orinda's.
One final note - the residents of Orinda demanded this 10-year systematic solution; we are talking about potholes and 311 tickets in Oakland. Your article is the proof.
Sean,
You're right, and it's the point I've been trying to make.
Orinda has about 4.9 miles of road per 1,000 residents. Oakland has 1.8. Each Orinda resident carries almost three times as much road as an Oaklander, a harder problem per person. Orinda fixed it anyway.
Orinda didn't decide to fix potholes. It decided to fix its road system. Voters approved dedicated sales taxes and $45 million in bonds, about $2,400 per resident. The city paired paving with storm drain repair and kept at it for ten years. Its pavement score went from 48 to 84.
Orinda could also afford to make that choice. Per capita income there is $140,621, and 2.2% of residents live in poverty. In Oakland, per capita income is $61,757, and 13.4% live in poverty. Orinda's $2,400 per resident is about 1.7% of a year's per capita income; for an Oaklander it would be 3.9%. More than 9 in 10 Orinda households own their homes, so a parcel tax there falls on owners with substantial equity. Most Oakland households rent. Sales taxes hit lower-income families hardest. Oakland can't ask its residents to pay at Orinda's rate without asking the people with the least to pay the most. That's the main difference between the two cities.
Even so, Oakland voters stepped up. Street bond dollars from Measures KK and U come to about $1,450 per resident, and those dollars also have to cover sidewalks, curb ramps, bikeways and safety projects. Then the FY25 budget action cut paving from $51.75 million to $6.75 million in a single year.
Orinda committed to its system and protected the money. Oakland keeps having the pothole conversation, about 311 tickets, open requests and patch counts. Patching treats symptoms. Paving and drainage, funded steadily over a decade, fix the system. Orinda is an excellent example and had the resources to tax itself.
Oakland also carries loads Orinda doesn't: about 3,000 port trucks a day, AC Transit's busiest lines, four interstates feeding regional traffic onto city streets, a 25-year ADA settlement, and a traffic safety crisis. None of that is a reason Oakland can't do what Orinda did. It's a reason Oakland's commitment has to be steady, protected and fair to the residents paying for it.
Josh, thank you for your responses, it's good to hear your perspective as Oakland's transportation director. Back to the potholes (the subject of this article), it sounds like you are alluding, but not saying outright, that Oakland's poor record on road maintenance, which has resulted in decades of below-standard pavement conditions, is a contributing factor to its remarkably high number of potholes, and their frequency of occurrence.
For example, the storm water you mention generally causes more damage on roads that are in poor condition than on roads that are kept in good condition. Water gets into the cracks, and the pressure of vehicles passing over compresses the water into the cracks and applies hydraulic forces to crack them open even more.
Thus, the city's decades of deferred maintenance on this core infrastructure responsibility has created a situation that is now costing significantly more taxpayer funding and city resources to remediate -- and a hole that will take the city years to fill, if ever.
As an Oaklander and an engineer eating lunch, here's my take. I do not set city policy. In my professional capacity, I influence it. I’m exchanging ideas today.
Oakland has a lot of work to do, but the full picture matters. We're a transportation city: our streets carry loads that aren't our own, we have equity issues that newer suburbs don't face, and we have a port whose importance will only grow as demand for Central Valley agricultural exports increases. On top of that, we're digging out from a pre-2016 era that didn't prioritize maintenance — not just pavement, but storm drainage, trees, and city-owned facilities too. And climate change, sea level rise, and more intense storms are going to hit Oakland harder than they hit Orinda.
I admire Orinda's commitment to a systems solution. I'd like to see that same thinking applied here. Most of what we call "potholes" are really a groundwater problem, and that's only going to get worse. If you care about pavement condition and reducing potholes, the system that actually needs fixing is storm drainage — not just pavement. And from a vehicle perspective, how we handle trucks and buses is its own important policy conversation.
If you could save 5 lives or pave 50 miles (in one year), which one would you choose? I’d love to see a similar article on auto speeding and severe crashes. It was troubling that 58% of speed camera citations were sent to non-Oakland addresses…..I wonder how much traffic in Orinda (auto and truck) is from outside the city. Oakland supports the Bay, arguably the world when factoring for exports. Orinda supports Orinda.
Hi Josh, thank you for your additional comment, but it is a deflection. This article is about potholes, not traffic. On the latter topic, many East Bay cities have traffic that passes through on its way to other destinations (Hayward, Berkeley, Richmond, Piedmont, ad nauseum), just as Oaklanders travel other cities' streets to get to where they need to go.
Thank you again for the engagement and discussion; we appreciate it.
Lives Saved > Miles Paved. That is my personal conviction.
One more point on Orinda.
Orinda delivered in ten years, and I'd gladly take ten years of paving at current funding levels. But the two cities aren't working with the same set of obligations.
Orinda maintains about 92 miles of road. Oakland maintains 806.
Oakland is also under a 25-year ADA settlement. It requires about 11,000 curb ramps in the first 15 years, every remaining ramp location brought to standard, and 78,000 sidewalk damage locations fixed within 25 years. That work draws on the same infrastructure dollars as paving.
Oakland also has a traffic safety emergency. We lost 36 people on our streets in 2022, 33 in 2023, 30 in 2024 and 23 in 2025. Safe Oakland Streets projects compete for the same capital funds, and they're saving lives: deaths are down by more than a third since 2022.