Roads, Pipes and Sidewalks

Ward 12 holds many of Sudbury's historic neighbourhoods: the Flour Mill, the Donovan, downtown, Uptown, New Sudbury and the Ferndale area of Minnow Lake. They carry some of the oldest roads, pipes and sidewalks we have.

Bad roads are a symptom

The potholes are what you see. The cause sits further back.

For decades we added roads, sewers and sidewalks faster than we added the residents, the industry and the occupied commercial space to pay for them. We opened new commercial districts while overall demand was falling, instead of redeveloping what we already had. This has led to higher costs with fewer people to pay them.

That is what an infrastructure deficit is. Not a budgeting error in any one year. It is the bill for decades of growth that added cost faster than it added revenue.

Turning the tide

You do not fix that by finding more money for asphalt. You fix it by changing the ratio.

• Grow the industrial base
• Rebuild the commercial districts we already have instead of opening new ones
• Where a commercial district is underused, support converting it to a mix of housing and commercial

All three add revenue on infrastructure we are already paying to maintain. That is the only kind of growth that closes the gap instead of widening it.

Know the threshold before you cross it

A road does not fail gradually. It holds up for most of its life and then drops fast. The practice is to apply the first preventive treatment before a pavement falls below a condition score of 70, because once structural damage starts the cheap treatments stop working and the only options left are rehabilitation, full reconstruction or reversion to gravel.

Missing that window is the most expensive thing a city can do to a road. It is also invisible, because the road still looks fine when the window closes.

So the question for your street is not whether it is bad yet. It is how long until it crosses the line, and whether we get there first.

Three asks that are now standard practice

My past campaign pushed for the city to publish the annual infrastructure gap, not just the total debt. It does now.

It also pushed for road conditions to be measured instead of estimated. The city now scans for it with dedicated equipment.

I pushed and lobbied for open by default. It is now the standard the city sets for itself in its own open data policy, which tells staff to ask "are there any reasons why we can't release this data?" instead of "why should we release this data?".

All three are ordinary practice here now, and the staff who built them deserve the credit for the work.

What is still closed

The city publishes where every road, pipe, sidewalk and bike route is. For water and sewer it also publishes when the pipe went in the ground. For roads and sidewalks it publishes no condition at all.

The province barely asks. For roads it wants one average pavement score for the entire city. For bridges, one average. For water and wastewater it does not ask about condition at all. It asks how many days residents were on a boil water advisory and how many basements backed up, which means you learn the pipe was failing after it fails. For sidewalks and bike lanes there is no provincial requirement at all.

So the city will tell you the age of your sewer and not the state of your road. Nobody decided that. It is what a 2017 regulation happened to list.

For any of it there is no privacy answer, no security answer and no health answer. These are numbers about pipe and asphalt.

You should be able to look up your own street and see where it is on the list for rehabilitation, and I should be able to tell you what we need to do to move it up that list.