Everyone living in Oakland knows the condition of our roads has been poor. Many of us have a mental list of streets we simply avoid, or memories of streets we’ve turned onto only to wonder if we were going to leave a muffler or catalytic converter behind.

The Oaklandside has dug into the city’s most recent pavement survey, and we can now officially say which streets are the worst in Oakland.

It’s a tie for first: Tyrrell Street between Courtland and 47th avenues and Woodcliff Court from Malcolm Avenue to the street’s north end.

But the competition was stiff. Hundreds of stretches of road — 871 to be precise — are so bad that assessors said they had 0 years of life left.

William Smith, who lives on Tyrrell, showed us a bent car rim, which he said had all been damaged by the street’s potholes just in the last three weeks. He said he’s also punctured two of his tires on the road.

“So I drive extremely slow and cautious,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll choose not to leave, seriously, just because this street is so bad. I only use it when I have to. It’s terrible.”

You can check how your street ranks in our look-up here.

Of course, some caveats are in order. 

After decades of disinvestment into the city’s nearly 850 miles of roads, the city has, over the last eight years, spent real money on making improvements, paving about 230 miles of road from June 2019 to June 2025, about twice as many miles as the previous decade. 

The assessment survey data we obtained was conducted between September and December 2024, so some roads have been fixed since then. But as the Department of Transportation waited for Measure U bonds to be put up for sale, little paving moved forward in 2025. Oakland’s Transportation Department told us that 18.6 miles of road have been paved in the last calendar year, up to now, or about 2.2% of the total, but the city didn’t give us a list of which ones. If yours has been paved in 2025, let us know and we’ll update our database.

City spokesperson Kent Bravo told us the bond sale, completed on December 3, will pour $50.5 million into road repairs for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026. That promises to make 2026 a good year for improvements, building on the department’s data-driven paving plans that account for decades of inequitable disinvestment. One reason Oakland created a Transportation Department in 2016 was to guarantee fair and consistent road repairs from the flatlands to the hills. 

The data we explored is found in a report we obtained called the Pavement Management System Update Data Collection & Quality Management Report, commissioned by the city’s Public Works Department and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and conducted by Adhara Systems, an independent road surveyor. The report, delivered to the city in January 2025, assigns two scores to each stretch of road.

The first is a paving condition index, or PCI, scored from 1 to 100, that measures the road’s health, including how cracked or worn its concrete and asphalt are. The city’s overall score rose to 60, or “fair,” for the first time since 2012 due to the recent paving campaign. 

Cities use PCI to determine which roads need to be paved most urgently and to estimate the costs of road repairs over time. Letting a street’s PCI score drop too low, into the poor and very poor scores, can cost the city big time. The Federal Highway Administration has found that rebuilding poor and very poor roads, with a PCI under 50, costs between four and 10 times what it costs to maintain a road that is at-risk or fair, with a PCI score between 50 and 70. Roads with these scores usually only need their top layer repaired with new asphalt, slurry, or ground-up old asphalt mixed with a binder material. Roads with under-50 PCI scores often need more expensive repairs to the concrete bed underneath.

The second measure, Remaining Life, is an estimate of how much time a road has left, in years, before it will need a major repair, based on the road’s PCI, its maintenance history, and the amount of traffic it receives. 

The 2025 report says 603 sections of the city’s roads — for a total of 142.5 miles — had PCI scores between 50 and 70 in the sweet spot for repair. Another 1,605 sections — a total of 351.2 miles — had scores above 70, and don’t require repairs right away.

A very large number of road sections — 1,763, covering 352 miles — had PCI scores below 50, and will be very expensive to repair. 

According to the report, Oakland would require an annual paving budget of $36.36 million to maintain the city’s current overall PCI of 60. With a $60 million-a-year paving budget, Oakland could reach an overall PCI of 70. 

To eliminate the backlog of road maintenance, the report estimates an eye-popping cost of $554.8 million. 

Projected pricing tables in the report detail the city’s options for achieving various PCI goals, based on budget availability, the type of repairs, and the date when the fix gets done. There are also tables detailing its options 

Take the stretch of Rosedale Avenue from E. 16th Street to E. 18th Street in East Oakland, which is tied for the fifth-worst road in the city. It’s the kind of road that darkens your mood just to look at it. In one of the scenarios, the projected cost in 2025 to repair the stretch of road with a thin asphalt overlay was $83,314. But to give it a four-inch layer of hot mix asphalt was projected to have cost $142,824 if it had been paved this year.

Of course, it wasn’t. 

According to the city’s paving budget forecast map, the road is slated to be paved sometime in the next year and a half. To repave it in 2027, the projected cost, with the same materials, rises to $151,522. If the city waits until 2029, the cost is projected to rise to $160,750.

John Goodwin, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, said ambitious pavement assessments like these typically happen every two years. 

“It is too costly to do this work for every jurisdiction annually,” he said. 

No bloom on this rose

People in Oakland who live on the worst streets say potholes and broken asphalt have become part of the tapestry of their lives, like an old rug that is ugly and stained, but you can’t afford to remove. 

That’s the case for Jose Manuel Barajas, a middle-aged father who lives on that lousy stretch of Rosedale Avenue, not too far from the hustle and bustle of International Boulevard. It has a PCI rating of 5 out of 100, and an estimated life left of 0. This part of Rosedale is so narrow that people often park their cars on the sidewalk, pushing pedestrians onto the road. 

Barajas tells his children to be careful when walking on the street, but he still worries they’ll trip and fall. He said that a few years ago, he tried to roller skate to see how far he could get, only to give up. 

“I was falling because the road is very ugly,” he said in Spanish. “When I drive, I go very slowly, obviously.” The road’s asphalt remnants, which have a shapeless, wavy appearance, hover in chunks above the ancient concrete like algae on a pond.

Barajas said he also worries about the drivers who blindly speed by in the middle of the night. The slightest swerve could make them smash into a house, another car, or even a person in the densely populated neighborhood. 

Barajas said PG&E recently tore up the road to fix an underground pipe, but when the crew were done, they had only repaved a small portion of the roadway. Oakland’s partnerships with utility companies often allow them to fix the whole street for similar jobs in cost-share agreements. 

Salvador Perez, a 73-year-old Oakland native who has lived in the neighborhood most of his life, said he remembers the last time Rosedale was fully paved — in the late 1960s, when he was a kid. If he’s right, the concrete exposed by the broken asphalt could date back to the original paving from the 1940s or 1950s. 

“They added speed bumps nearby in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but that was the last of anyone touching this neighborhood,” Perez said. “Sometimes they come around to fix a pothole, but it seems like they can’t keep up.” 

Maria de los Ángeles Covarrubias, a senior who owns a house on the street, said she has a hard time walking on the road with a leg injury. She told us that her complaints to the city have gone unanswered. 

“My son sends emails to the city constantly,” she said. “Noel Gallo doesn’t pick up. It looks third-world around here.” Gallo, the city councilmember from District 5, did not respond to a query.

From worst to worst

Driving around the city over the last two weeks to locate the worst roads in Oakland based on a technical score has sometimes felt like an exercise in absurdity. That’s because so many roads near the bottom of the ratings are so bad.

Even some roads with middling ratings looked like a total disaster.

For example, the stretch of Stanley Avenue from Frazier to 98th avenues looked like a series of rolling hills of overturned concrete. But it showed up on the survey as tied for the 1,599th-worst road, with a PCI of 45 and a remaining life of 5.77 years.

Some roads lived up to their bottom billing.

A stretch of Tyrrell Street in the Fairfax neighborhood tied for the city’s worst pavement score, with a PCI of 2 out of 100, and 0 years of life left. No one we spoke with there was surprised. 

On a street lined mainly with Black and brown families, many of whom said they have lived there for decades, everyone was highly aware of the historical lack of attention. Smith, the one who showed us his bent car rims, said he moved from Vallejo to Oakland during the pandemic. He said the cost of living was higher there, but at least the roads were better. “It’s making me second-guess my move, honestly,” he said. 

Smith said one of his uncles won’t visit because he’s afraid the street conditions will damage his car. 

Erwin Gonzalez, who lives at the corner of Tyrrell and 47th Avenue, drives slowly to avoid the buildup of broken asphalt, which becomes muddy during rain, causing slippage on the hill. The city patched parts about a year ago, but he showed us where the patches were already breaking down.

“This is what happens if you don’t maintain it,” he said. 

On the other side of the city, I stopped by Linden Street between 18th and 21st streets: PCI 5, remaining life 0, tied for the city’s ninth-worst street. There, I met Terry Johnson, who told me that his mother almost hurt herself while getting out of a car when she didn’t see a ridge in the road. 

Driving north a few blocks on Linden, then turning left onto 24th Street, I stopped at the Magnolia Street intersection and walked two blocks up to Poplar Street. The segment of 24th Street here had long pieces of asphalt turned over, exposing the ground floor throughout. It’s one of the worst collector streets in the city, tied for ninth-worst overall with a PCI of 5, even though it serves as a crucial road connecting the arterials of Market and Peralta Streets and Mandela Parkway. 

At the corner of Union Street on 24th, I ran into Jason Soll, a sales vice president at MN Builders, one of the oldest construction firms in Oakland. He told me he’s only seen Oakland staff patch up 24th Street a few times in the 22 years he’s worked there. 

“ I saw a biker fall on the street and I brought her here, and we gave her first aid,” Soll said. “I’ve also sprained and twisted my ankle and stumbled on the street because you just can’t walk without paying attention.”

Given that Soll works in construction, we asked him what he thought about the city patching roads instead of fully reconstructing them. He said the cold-patch asphalt that is frequently used can help, but it doesn’t last. He said a large pothole near his girlfriend’s house on Fruitvale was cold-patched, but a month later, the hole came back. 

With a full repair, “it’s hot asphalt, and they do an oil bond,” he said. “But a cold patch, they just dump it in the hole and pack it down.”

After 20 years of running a tow truck company in East Oakland, Ustadi Kadiri has become inured to crappy roads. 

Kadiri’s operation is located on 89th Avenue, and this stretch, between E and G streets, is tied for third-worst with a PCI of 3. He told me the city has never fully paved 89th and that he recently had to pay to repave the entry to his businesses, which he said cost him $3,000. The giant potholes, some filled with stillwater, are so bad that drivers work to avoid them. 

“It’s a bumpy street, and everybody knows it,” he said. “Nobody’s flying down here because you’ll mess up your suspension or hit a pothole.”

“Everybody here,” he said, naming all the neighborhood towers, “we all deal with it.”

Paving victories, and paving stumbles

The report identifies the three common types of roads: local, collectors, and arterials. Locals are small residential streets, and arterials are the city’s major thoroughfares; collectors are the roads that link the locals to the arterials. It found that the 2,837 local streets had an aggregate PCI score of 53; the 509 collectors were at 59; and the 625 arterials, the longest, widest, and most critical roads used by everyone, had an aggregate PCI of 71 — a reflection of the city’s paving priorities.

Maintaining good PCI scores for the big arterials improves safety for most drivers and also raises the city’s weighted PCI score, which helps the city show forward momentum to potential funders. Still, as Rowan noted in his May paving report, the average PCI of local streets, while relatively low, has risen by 10 points in the last four years, “from a program-historic low of 43 in 2019.”

The 2025 report shows a handful of new, eyebrow-raising scores, with 16 newly paved stretches assessed with a remaining life of 60 years or more. According to Adhara Systems, the San Jose-based firm that conducted the survey, those top Remaining Life numbers are associated with concrete roads, which, in general, have a longer lifespan. Streets also get higher Remaining Life scores if they’re expected to experience low levels of traffic. 

A whole series of strategic plans created by the Oakland Department of Transportation — OakDOT’s strategic plan in 2016, a pedestrian plan in 2017, a capital improvement program scorecard in 2018, and a bike plan and a three-year paving plan in 2019 — laid the groundwork for Oakland to resuscitate its paving program. Cost-sharing agreements between PG&E and EBMUD to repave when streets are already ripped up also helped. But the city’s financial problems — and the delayed bond sales — have slowed implementation of these plans. 

The last time the city approved a multiple-year paving plan was in 2022, when officials promised to pave 55 miles a year for five years, for a total of 400 miles. In the years since, the city only came close to hitting that target in calendar year 2024, when Rowan said they paved 53.9 miles.

Over the last few years, the city suffered massive structural deficits, which, according to an Alameda County Grand Jury report, were exacerbated by poor administrative management and inadequate communication among city councilmembers, OakDOT, and other city staff, making it hard for the city to meet the full ambitions of its paving plans. 

Oakland’s austerity budgets have meant OakDOT hiring freezes and construction contract processing that ground to a halt, exacerbated by technical problems like the malfunctioning of the city’s sole concrete mill. All of this combined to produce lower paving numbers. 

And the longer streets go unpaved, the more likely it is that small cracks will grow and become potholes, exposing the street’s concrete sub-base to erosion. 

In a recent interview on KQED, John Goodwin, the MTC spokesperson, said that water was a key factor in road deterioration. Once water sneaks into cracks on the road, traffic loads break up the asphalt and create potholes. The more traffic passes over that road, the more it degrades, with heavier vehicles causing even more damage. A delivery truck places 400 times more stress on a road than an SUV, he said, buses 7,000 times more, and garbage trucks 9,000 times more. 

On the bright side, Goodwin compared different municipalities and found that cities with poor grades can, with consistent paving, improve road conditions quickly. 

“What is really interesting about Larkspur is that a decade ago, it was in the at-risk category,” he said. “But the voters of Larkspur approved a couple of local taxes, decided that pavement quality is a civic virtue and a civic priority.”

How the assessment was performed

Between September and December 2024, Adhara Systems analyzed 3,304 road sections totaling 706.3 miles, a total that didn’t include roads Oakland had resurfaced since July 2022. 

In all, 2,311 local streets, 544 arterial roads, and 449 collector roads were analyzed. 

Adhara used a vehicle equipped with cameras to photograph the roads, detecting cracks and other distressed areas. When required, technicians got out of the car to personally inspect.

Adhara had a sampling rate of 45%. During the data-gathering, roads with mixed scores were sometimes reinspected, as happened on that bad stretch of Rosedale Avenue.

The assessment goes deep, determining how much road deterioration is attributed to external factors. For example, Adhara also scored roads for the type of traffic load each receives, known as the percentage load (“Pct Load”), including from heavy-duty vehicles. Higher ratings mean a road needs a structural change rather than surface repairs. Another rating is the percentage of environmental deterioration (“Pct Envr”), which measures such factors as water exposure and oxidation. These percentages work together to indicate which party is more at fault for the road condition. 

An independent report like this one from Adhara Systems can be interpreted differently by the road engineers who receive it. 

“Sometimes the dispute scores are rectified and changed,” Goodwin said about PCI and Remaining Life scores. “Other times — after confirming the methodologies used are indeed correct and appropriate — MTC holds firm to original scoring.” 

A summary of the 3,304 sections that Adhara assessed, in a chart the company created, above, indicates that the company identified 43% of street miles as excellent or good, 41% as poor or very poor, and the rest landed somewhere in the middle. 

If you live on one of the worst roads and have stories of your own — or if you live on a street that got paved in 2025 and want to let us know — please email me at jose@oaklandside.org.