Portland's busy streets, also known as collectors and arterials, are where most of Portland's traffic travels, including transit and freight. It is important to keep these roads in fair or better condition to ensure safe access for transporting people and goods throughout Portland.

Regarding pavement preservation, it is important to keep pavement in fair or better condition in order to keep repair costs affordable. Pavement typically deteriorates slowly during the first few years after it is installed. Then, it declines quickly after that, regardless of the street design or paving materials. It is much more costly to repair pavement in poor or very poor condition than it is to maintain pavement in good condition. Therefore, in order to maximize Portlanders' investment, our goal is to keep pavement in fair to better condition so we can deliver more affordable preservation solutions.

The city of Portland's pavement is declining in its overall condition with a majority now in poor or very poor condition. This means that Portland will need to invest much more into full pavement reconstruction and reactive maintenance, like pothole filling, than in more affordable pavement preservation efforts. 

Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) determines the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) for each pavement segment by conducting a visual inspection of City streets using the Metropolitan Transportation Commission methodology. The visual inspection data is entered into PBOT's pavement management system (StreetSaver), which produces this performance metric, as well as provides current and future condition curves and forecasting, budget scenarios, and detailed reporting.

More information can be found at the Pavement Resurfacing and Preservation and the Fixing Our Streets website. Refer to PBOT's Asset Management website to learn more about how PBOT manages its assets.