Atascadero city officials have directed $17M in funding toward improving city roads since 2014. Now almost a decade later, 52 miles of roads have been repaired.
Longtime Atascadero resident Mary Ann Lane said she’s glad to see the recent improvements, especially to San Marcos Road, where she and her husband walk near their home.
"I was encouraged that they got this done,” Lane said, “This road on San Marcos needs some road repair. I mean it’s getting down to just like gravel and separate chunks of the roads that you can see.”
She said that the roads worsened after last year’s mudslides when drivers were forced to use San Marco Road as an alternate route in and out of Atascadero.
“They wrecked the road because you had busses, big rigs, everything going over it. And it just really, really deteriorated the road quite a bit more than it had been,” Lane said.
Public Works Director Nick DeBar said city officials have improved over a third of Atascadero’s city-owned roads already.
“We’ve actually worked on 52 miles of the 145 miles in town - 36% of all city-maintained roads,” DeBar said.
Atascadero’s roads were projected to be in worse shape by now.
“We rank roads in town by something called Pavement Condition Index. It’s a scale of 0 to 100 and when we started our F-14 measure in 2015, our roads had a PCI measure of 47,” DeBar said. Had they not implemented F-14, the roads were projected to decline to level 32.
“We’re currently at 49,” DeBar said.
The city will continue working on the remaining roads and repairs this year.
