Georgina’s roads getting serviced

Town creates ‘leap-frog’ cycle for road construction moving forward

Yorkregion.com
Jan. 17, 2020
Amanda Persico

Georgina has approved its road construction work plan for the coming year, which includes a laundry list of roads that will be serviced.

Instead of working year-to-year, the town is moving toward a two-year road construction plan. The wash-rinse-repeat plan will create a cycle of maintenance, engineering and construction work -- all in an effort to catch up on a number of deteriorating roads.

This ‘leap-frog’ cycle will see tender and design work completed in year one, construction in year two, and road maintenance work completed in the spring and fall, said the town’s operations and infrastructure director, Rob Flindall.

“There’s no scramble to get all the work done in year one,” he said. “It’s more efficient and better planning (to use a two-year cycle).”

The 2020 road works budget is set at $956,000 -- based on high-level estimates as well as funds carried over from 2019, Flindall added.

Additional benefits include two-year tenders and contacts, and -- with that -- better pricing he added.

The town is also planning to team up with the region and other municipalities to conduct more data analysis on the condition of Georgina's roads, Flindall said -- allowing for more quantifiable road-by-road assessments.

At the helm of the work plan is a long list of preventive maintenance work, starting with small patch jobs and crack sealing.

For a complete list, click here.

Patch work helps lessen the number and depth of potholes wreaking havoc on vehicles, while crack sealing helps prevent water from expanding and contracting deep within the road, and further breaking up the asphalt.

Preventive maintenance is ‘smarter spending’ -- spending less money to extend the lifespan of a road said the town’s capital project manager, Bob Fortier.

“If we follow the worst-to-first approach, we’ll never catch up,” Fortier said. “We don’t want to drive the roads till failure. Preventive maintenance is about the right repair at the right cost.”

According to State of the Infrastructure for Roads, Georgina's latest pavement management report, preventive maintenance is cheaper than reconstruction -- to the tune of about $5 reconstruction dollars to every $1 spent on maintenance. For every dollar not spent on road rehabilitation or maintenance earlier in a road’s lifespan, road reconstruct costs would be five times higher than maintenance costs.

And, to get the best bang for taxpayers' bucks, road maintenance is best served within the first 25 per cent of a road’s lifespan, when the surface quality has dropped by less than 40 per cent.

As road work gets more expansive on the maintenance scale -- including crack sealing, resurfacing and reconstruction -- there’s a decreasing return on the town’s investment.

Based on 2015 dollars, an appropriately maintained road has a life-cycle cost of about $297,000, depending on the length of the road. Costs would skyrocket to over $1 million for the same road if no maintenance was done and the road had to be replaced or reconstructed from the ground up.

The bulk of the $956,000 budget, about $675,000, will be spent on road reconstruction projects along Maple Avenue, Irving Drive and, if funds permit, Dunkirk Avenue. Also included in the reconstruction category are a number of gravel roads in Udora, which also require drainage improvements.

Included in reconstruction budget are geotechnical investigations and any engineering design work required for each road.

The town’s roads are given a classification number between 1 and 10, where total reconstruction is anticipated within the next 1 to 10 years.

This classification number is not an action timeline and does not depict a year when action should be taken.

As of 2015, there are more than 665 lane-kilometres of road, of which more than 62 per cent are asphalt. The rest are made up of earth, gravel and other surfaces. And not surprising, the majority -- more than 66 per cent -- are found in the urban and semi-urban areas of town.

There are a number of factors that move a particular street up or down the priority list, including traffic counts, maintenance schedule, cross-section and the percentage of trucks using the route.

Story Behind the Story: After learning about the 2020 roads work plan, reporter Amanda Persico spoke with the town’s operations director and capital project manager to find out how this program will roll out.