A recent survey of Taylor’s streets showed a reduction in the number of dilapidated roads and the city council recently approved further improvements as part of the Leveling Up program.

“Fifty-seven percent of our roads are rated ‘fair,’ ‘satisfactory’ or ‘good.’ That’s much better than four years ago. We want to continue that trend and minimize ‘failing,’ ‘serious’ or ‘very poor’ ratings,” Jacob Walker of HDR Engineering told the council on Thursday.

Walker discussed the results of a study conducted by Applied Research Associates. The company was hired in October to study all of Taylor’s roads, a total of 301 roadway miles.

State and county roads were not included in the survey.

The previous study was conducted in 2019-2020 and measured only the cracks in the pavement. In this study, the engineer said, they took into account not only the condition of the pavement but also the driving quality of the roads.

“You can have a road that has a lot of cracks but isn’t that bumpy and uneven, and you can have roads that are pretty bumpy and hard to drive on but don’t actually have that many cracks,” he said. “So we asked them to add those two together and weight each number to get an overall condition index.”

The roads were then graded into seven categories ranging from “poor” to “good.” Each road in Taylor has a rating, and those ratings are helpful in knowing what to do with those lanes in terms of maintenance or next steps, officials said.

A comparison between 2020 and 2024 shows a decrease in the number of defective and serious roads and an increase in satisfactory and good roads, the council was told.

Walker acknowledged that this was partly due to the number of roads built in the last five years, but did not immediately say how many.

At the beginning of the year, the Department of Public Works launched a program to “upgrade” the worst streets in the city’s districts. The upgrade will be applied to streets that are classified as poor or very poor and are not main traffic arteries.

This technique differs from the more common “mill and overlay” technique because milling removes the top layer of asphalt before applying a new surface. Leveling simply lays a new surface on top of the old, rough asphalt.

The advantages of the rehabilitation are that the city can do it without contractors, that it is relatively quick and that the roads will last one to three years longer, officials said. Public Works Director Jim Gray said the city spent $250,000 on the first phase of the program and has a total budget of $860,000 that comes from traffic and utility fee funds. Phase One completed about 30 sections of road that were considered to be in the worst shape. Phase Two will address 39 sections of road and cost $236,000 and should be completed by year’s end. Phase Three will include about 25 sections of road and has a budget of $240,000. That road work will begin in the spring.

This year, the department will work on repairing longer stretches of road, Gray said.

“We shot a lot of 300-foot segments, and people were upset because we stopped right in front of their house. Some of them stopped in the middle of a block,” Gray said. “This program is not intended to be a reconstruction. It is intended to make driving easier and to improve the view in front of the houses in the program.”

Councilman Gerald Anderson was happy to hear that East Second Street, after being overlooked for many years, would be on the list of streets to be redeveloped in the future.

Anderson lives on one of Taylor’s four dirt roads. Since the previous assessment method only considered cracks in the pavement, the dirt and gravel roads were classified as crack-free and therefore not in need of repair.

“Roads like mine were not repaired. They were overlooked because they were in such bad condition that they were not even graded,” he said.

At Gray’s suggestion, the City Council asked staff to schedule a workshop later in the year to learn more about budget needs for ongoing maintenance and repair of the city’s transportation system.

“

“This program is not intended as a reconstruction. It is intended to make driving easier and to make it easier to see the houses.”

— Jim Gray, director of public works at Taylor