The city of San Diego is losing the battle against its own roads.
The most recent update from the city of San Diego’s Transportation Department shows a huge gap in funding for repairing roadways.
The current level of funding would lead to a rapidly deteriorating road network that will cost even more to fix in the future, according to Transportation Department projections.
But efforts in recent years to raise revenue for road repairs and to improve public transportation — an alternative to driving — failed at the ballot box. Now the city is left with ongoing budget issues and an $8 billion gap in funding for critical infrastructure projects citywide over the next five years.
UC San Diego professor Bill Fulton, who served as San Diego’s city planning director from 2013 to 2014, said the problem starts with the low density, or “sprawl,” of many city neighborhoods.
“When you have a sprawling city, the math doesn't add up,” Fulton told KPBS. “Between the amount of tax revenue coming in and the amount of money that has to go out the door for services.”
But San Diego is not alone or unique in having this problem. Cities across the country are realizing that it simply costs too much to maintain the vast network of roads — and other infrastructure — that millions of daily drivers require.
“Most cities in the U.S. don’t have the density, and therefore the tax base per square footage of road, to be able to maintain (them) well,” said Michael Schneider, founder and CEO of Streets for All, a nonprofit that advocates for more sustainable transportation systems.
Shane Phillips, Housing Initiative Project Manager for the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said in California, this issue is uniquely compounded by Proposition 13, which limits the amount of property tax revenue cities collect.
California passed Prop 13 in 1978. It limits how much property taxes can increase year-over-year, meaning homes in many of the older, wealthier neighborhoods in San Diego aren’t paying nearly as much in taxes as they would without Prop 13.
“It's just kind of this destructive cycle we've gotten ourselves into,” Phillips told KPBS.
San Diego has the second largest network of roads in California after Los Angeles, according to the city’s 2024 Pavement Management Plan. The money the Transportation Department says it needs to maintain, let alone improve, all of those roadways is far beyond what was allocated in the Fiscal Year 2027 budget that was approved by the city council this month.
The funding gap was detailed in the April Pavement Management Plan update from the Transportation Department. It says the road network needs $1.8 billion over the next 10 years to maintain a Pavement Condition Index (PCI) of 65, which is considered “fair” condition.
Mayor Todd Gloria said multiple times during the city’s budget process this year that fixing the roads is one of his main priorities.
“From slurry seal to asphalt overlay to in-house mill and pave, our teams are doing the hard work to finally fix the damn roads in every corner of the city,” Gloria said in an Instagram post last year when the city announced it had repaired 500 miles of streets last year.
And in a May social media post, the mayor said the budget, “... stays focused on the fundamentals: keeping you safe, fixing roads and other infrastructure, reducing homelessness, and building more housing.”
But this year’s new budget allocated $83 million to the streets division of the Transportation Department.
This is the division that is responsible for the “maintenance and repair of street and alley surfaces, sidewalks, streetlights, traffic signals, traffic signs, pavement markings, guardrails, and other traffic control and safety devices,” according to the budget.
But in 2024, the department said it would need $273 million in 2027 for the pavement management plan. For the past two years the amount allocated has been far below what the department said it needs.
The long-term effect of underfunding road repairs is a rapidly deteriorating road network. At current levels of funding, the road network score in San Diego will fall to an average PCI of 52, well within the “poor” designation, by 2035.
And roads only get more expensive to fix as they deteriorate further. In the 2024 report, the Transportation Department detailed how deferring maintenance now increases costs down the road.
“And unfortunately what we've seen is that … a lot of those streets that are just sort of beyond the ability … to repair, the city has kind of abandoned,” said Colin Parent, CEO of Circulate Planning and Policy, a California nonprofit that advocates for public transit and street safety.
Parent said many of the worst quality roads are in neighborhoods like Encanto in south eastern San Diego.
“There are some streets that if you don't live in those areas, you would be astonished to believe that there are streets of that poor quality,” Parent said.
“If funding stays at current levels, street conditions will decline significantly, reaching about PCI 53 (poor) within 10 years,” San Diego Transportation Department spokesperson Anthony Santacroce said in an email to KPBS. “The Transportation Department acknowledges the need for higher investment but does not assume the City will reach the funding level needed for PCI 70 within 10 years.”
That means the “damn roads” are not getting fully fixed anytime soon. Not without a new, dedicated revenue stream — or a serious modeshift away from driving.
Fulton echoed Phillips in highlighting the minimal amount of property tax revenue cities collect due to Prop 13. He said property taxes are not generating nearly as much revenue as people paying them might think.
“And out of that [limited revenue] [the city has] to pay for police; they got to pay for fire; they got to pay for all the other services, and they got to pay [for] your streets and roads,” Fulton said.
As a result, many cities in California have turned to local sales tax measures to make up the difference. But those local taxes require voter approval; something that’s proven difficult in San Diego.
“I think San Diego's tolerance for more taxes has always been pretty low,” Fulton said.
Measure E failed in 2024 by less than 1% of the vote. That half-cent sales tax would have raised $400 million per year for road repairs, among other things. Much of the city’s current budget issues could have been mitigated by the revenue from Measure E.
Measure G also failed at the county level by less than 1% of the vote that same year. That 1% sales tax county-wide would have raised $350 million annually for road repairs, transit upgrades, and congestion reduction programs — efforts to take cars off the road.
The narrowly-defeated Measure G highlighted the urban-rural divide in San Diego County, with the majority of city residents voting in favor, as KPBS reported at the time.
But those against Measure G argued the San Diego Association of Governments, or SANDAG, can’t be trusted with more taxpayer money, and many believed it was an effort to tax people out of their cars.
“The only way I can think of to fix it is to give people real alternatives to the car, so they don't have to drive for every trip, so the roads don't wear down as quickly as they otherwise would,” Schneider said. “Rail. Bus rapid transit, bike lanes, denser parts- even if the city’s spread out, denser corridors where people can congregate and live and work without having to drive for everything.”
Colin Parent said this just isn’t the case in San Diego.
“If you want to get somewhere on time, you've got to drive in a lot of circumstances,” Parent told KPBS.
And that problem could be getting worse.
The San Diego Metropolitan Transportation System, or MTS, is facing its own budget deficit that’s prompting them to raise fares and explore a measure for dedicated transit funding that could be on the ballot in 2028.
“MTS currently lacks statutory authority to pursue most other funding,” Steve Goble, MTS board vice chair and El Cajon City Council member, said at a June budget meeting. “So that implies the sales tax is kind of our clearest, most defined path at this point.”
The agency is currently struggling to stave off service cuts. Any expansion plans are postponed indefinitely. And the increased fare cost will cause the system to lose riders, according to MTS staff. If those riders turn to driving, they will then contribute more to the deterioration of the road system.
And a recent grand jury report found that the city is falling well short of building enough safe bike infrastructure to meet its Climate Action Plan, or CAP, goal to have 10% of all daily trips in the city made by bike by 2035.
“Bike lanes start and disappear,” the report says. “Navigating major traffic arteries connecting neighborhoods with multi-lanes like El Cajon Blvd., Mira Mesa Blvd., and Martin Luther King St., exceeds many people’s tolerance for traffic stress.”
The report also highlights how the city’s degrading pavement puts bike riders in already-dangerous traffic at even more risk. It says 64% of bike lanes in the city are Class II.
That means painted lines, often on a road with high traffic volumes, put bike riders directly adjacent to cars travelling at 45 miles per hour or faster.
Potholes and other road issues create additional hazards for bike riders in these lanes. But because bike infrastructure is usually bundled with pavement maintenance, according to the report, fixing or improving them has to come from the same underfunded road repair budget.
“If LA could get 10% of its population to [commute] by e-bike, or San Diego could, compared to a car, that would also save … the roads a lot more,” Schneider said.
All of this puts city leaders in a tough position. The city doesn’t have enough money to completely fix the roads, or the rest of its infrastructure; but raising more revenue requires more taxes, which voters have now thrice rejected after Measure A’s defeat in June of this year.
Efforts to reduce traffic volumes, by improving public transportation or building alternatives like bike lanes, face similar funding obstacles as well as public pushback.
Without a clear path forward for what can come first, city leaders are faced with a chicken-or-egg situation. San Diegans won’t choose alternatives to cars if those alternatives are not viable; but those alternatives can’t improve without significantly more funding, which requires public support.
A 2015 report from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute and the New Climate Economy, part of the World Resource Institute (WRI), analyzed how low-density development patterns make people drive.
It said that “sprawl,” characterized as low-density, automobile-oriented, suburb-style land use, “significantly increases per capita land development, and by dispersing activities, increases vehicle travel.”
“These physical changes impose various economic costs including reduced agricultural and ecological productivity, increased public infrastructure and service costs, plus increased transport costs including consumer costs, traffic congestion, accidents, pollution emissions, reduced accessibility for nondrivers, and reduced public fitness and health,” the report continued.
In other words, maintaining a system where everybody drives costs a lot of money. It’s potentially more than San Diegans have the appetite to pay for through taxes, and it can impact public health and societal wellbeing. But for decades in California, this has been the dominant pattern of land use that cities allow.
UCLA’s Shane Phillips said this pattern often emerges in part because developers often pay for the infrastructure in their new developments.
“This is just a problem with most communities where a greenfield developer, or developer at the edge of the city, where nothing has been built before…they'll build not just the housing, but all of the infrastructure, all the streets, all the sewer lines, maybe even some schools, things like that,” Phillips said. “And it feels like this great boon for the city getting all this free infrastructure.”
But the city then has to pay for maintaining all of that infrastructure in the long term, leading to the situation San Diego finds itself in today.
“When the bill comes due for the next resurfacing, for replacement, for rebuilding in 30 years, 50 or 60 years, (the city is) entirely on the hook for that,” Phillips said.
On the other hand, research led by experts at the WRI and ECOnorthwest, with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts, shows how the opposite of sprawl — dense construction near jobs and transit — has the opposite effect.
“... Building homes near existing jobs, stores, and transit saves public dollars, in both up-front infrastructure and ongoing maintenance costs, and produces more revenue in property taxes per acre than local governments can expect from development at the edge of town,” the report said.
Phillips said the report details how the comparative cost–not just for infrastructure, but for police, fire fighters, and other services — is much lower in denser areas than in sprawling suburban neighborhoods.
“I think what people don't realize is dense areas of the city, such as downtown, such as UTC, such as Hillcrest, actually subsidize the low density single family suburbs,” Fulton said. “If it wasn't for those very dense places that generate an enormous amount of property tax … the city's budget situation would be even more difficult.”
State legislators are now trying to encourage higher density development. The state recently passed a bill to allow more homes near existing public transportation, reformed its landmark environmental law to streamline housing production, and are supporting denser downtown areas.
And the city is already permitting many homes in its most walkable neighborhoods. These are places where residents don’t have to drive everywhere because jobs, shops, parks, and public transit are all within easy walking distance.
But there are still ongoing battles over where more density should be allowed, and significant public backlash to the city’s efforts to boost production.
“Politicians love faster solutions,” Schneider said, “There is no fast solution to this. It requires changing how people get around, finding more money to sort of tide you over, and fundamentally rethinking how we pay for these things.”
Mayor Gloria’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
