Houston Potholes Tracker
Next Day Pothole Repair Rate Verified by Independent Third Party
City Turns Attention to Bigger Street Issues
February 17, 2016 -- One month after formally launching his new pothole repair program, Mayor Sylvester Turner has released an independent report that verifies the pothole repair rate displayed on the City’s website. The Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University was asked to analyze the numbers presented on www.houstonpotholes.org between January 4 and January 21, 2016. That analysis confirms that the statistics displayed on the website are accurate.
“This independent verification confirms that we are delivering on the pledge to quickly respond to pothole complaints,” said Mayor Turner. “This is an example of the new level of customer service I expect City government to deliver. Our employees have risen to the challenge and they deserve a huge thank you. Now it is time to focus on achieving a similar success story for the other more involved street repairs.”
Between January 4, 2016 and February 16, 2016, a total of 1,976 potholes had been repaired in response to citizen service requests received by 311. Although there have been several individual days during this time period when the next day business repair rate hit 100 percent, the average since the program began is 95 percent. During this same timeframe, the City proactively filled an additional 7,839 potholes. The number of service requests received by 311 that turned out not to be potholes, were duplicates, posed no safety hazard or were the responsibility of the Texas Department of Transportation or another agency totaled 1636; there were 41 service requests still awaiting assessment.
Since the start of the mayor’s pothole program, there has also been an increase in reports of other street conditions which take longer to repair. Now that the next business day pothole repair performance metric has been institutionalized as the standard operating procedure, the City is ramping up its response to the other problems. The goal is to complete these more involved street repairs within 30 days. Extra contract crews have been put in place to help. The numbers show significant progress, decreasing from a high of 1149 open street condition cases in 311 on January 30, 2016 to 779 cases as of yesterday.
