California Ranks 43rd in the Nation in Cost-Effectiveness and Condition

According to the Annual Highway Report by Reason Foundation, this is a two-spot fall from California’s ranking of 47th overall in

the last evaluation of the condition, safety, and costs of roads and bridges in all 50 states.

In safety and condition categories, California’s highways rank 47th in urban Interstate pavement condition, 46th in rural Interstate pavement condition, 50th in urban arterial pavement condition, 41st in rural arterial pavement condition, 25th in structurally deficient bridges, 33rd in urban fatality rate, and 28th in rural fatality rate.

California ranks 44th out of the 50 states in traffic congestion, and its drivers spend 60 hours a year stuck in traffic congestion.

In spending and cost-effectiveness, California ranks 43rd in capital and bridge disbursements, which are the costs of building new roads and bridges and widening existing ones. California ranks 44th in maintenance spending, such as the costs of repaving roads and filling in potholes. California’s administrative disbursements, including office spending that doesn’t make its way to roads, ranks 35th nationwide.

The category in which the state improved the most from the previous report was rural fatality rate (39th to 28th).

California worsened the most in urban fatalities (23rd to 33rd).

Compared to neighboring and nearby states, California’s overall highway performance is worse than Nevada’s (24th), Arizona’s (29th), Oregon’s (35th), and Washington’s (47th).

Comparing its overall performance to similarly populated states, California ranks behind Florida (14th) and Texas (25th).

California’s highway system ranks 49th out of 50 states overall this year, ranked 47th in last year’s report, and was 43rd in the nation five years ago, in 2019.

“In terms of improving in the road condition and performance categories, California should focus on improving urban and rural Interstate pavement quality, improving both rural and urban principal arterial pavement quality, reducing maintenance and capital-bridge disbursements, and improving urbanized area congestion. The state ranks in the bottom 10 states for each of these performance-based categories,” said Baruch Feigenbaum, lead author of the 28th Annual Highway Report and senior managing director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation. It also ranks in the bottom 10 for other fatality rate, which is another weakness.

*2021 data
The Annual Highway Report is based on spending and performance data submitted by state highway agencies to the federal government and urban congestion data from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute for 2020 as well as bridge condition data from the Better Roads inventory for 2021. For more details on the calculation of each of the 13 performance measures used in the report, as well as the overall performance measure, please refer to the appendix in the main report. The report’s dataset includes Interstate, federal, and state roads, but not county or local roads. All rankings are based on performance measures that are ratios rather than absolute values: the financial measures are disbursements per mile, the fatality rate is fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles of travel, the urban congestion measure is the annual delay per auto commuter, and the others are percentages. For example, the state ranking 1^st in structurally deficient bridges has the smallest percentage of structurally deficient bridges, not the smallest number of structurally deficient bridges.