The PCI Score: A Tool that Promotes Urban Decay and Tax Increases

A 2025 Capital Road Construction Program report from staff to council has argued for a considerable increase in funding for local capital road projects.

The report notes that the average pavement condition index (PCI) score shows that our roads are in “fair” condition overall, with most (two thirds) of our roads in “fair” to “excellent” condition.

Many factors determine the PCI score. The key variables that affect and are affected by the PCI are the volume and type of traffic.

While the staff report claims that resurfacing roads (the one third needing resurfacing to maintain existing Level of Service) at taxpayer cost of $331M over the next decade would make the roads safer and reduce damage to vehicles, the evidence does not support this claim: while seeming intuitive, that argument is little more than illusion and spectacle to drive wasteful taxpayer spending.

Assuming for decades the legitimacy of the above claims are exactly why our roads are a concern, and this report and its underlying political concerns have arisen.

Ultimately, resurfaced, new and wider roads induce more traffic—called latent demand or induced demand—leading to faster road deterioration city-wide, requiring more funding, repairs and costs.

More traffic and poorer roads both decrease road user safety.

Increased demand also leads to more congestion in key areas, and reduced road user safety on all roads due to the normalisation of increased speed expectations, both primary causes of road deterioration.

But this vicious cycle needn't exist at all.

The report not only ignores but distracts attention from the many low to zero cost options to preserve and protect our roads from deterioration and increase road user safety. The report also distracts from an abundance of options and mechanisms to fund resurfacing and improved road design that do not include debt, increased property taxes or reliance on upper levels of government or grants.

Crane offered one such option for sustainable mobility in our 2019 budget submission. That option illustrated a savings of $15M annually, or $150M over a decade in contrast to the $331 cost presented by this staff report.

There are many other options.

And yet, with the speeding problem the city and residents are struggling with, it appears most drivers don't appear to worry about the current road quality.

We decided to take a closer look at the motion and staff report to better understand this conflicted and inconsistent approach, and why simpler and lower cost options and obvious opportunities were being ignored.

Our analysis suggests the framing of the council resolution and staff report was restrictively narrow, prevented discussion of options, and demonstrated an austerity-driven authoritarianism that deliberately precluded public engagement and democratic decision making around the social reproduction of urbanism and equity.

This framing used four key approaches to do this: (1) technocratic rationalizations via quantitative metrics (e.g. PCI); (2) managerial framing of scarcity and prioritization; (3) neoliberal orientations toward austerity under cost minimization, grant dependency, and “pay-as-you-go” (PAYG) fiscal governance; and (4) legitimation through comparative benchmarking and appeals to populism, specifically in this case, individual mobility foregrounded within automobility.

Our analysis underscores how language obscures sociopolitical contestation and establishes authoritarian decision making, undermining democracy by embedding infrastructure policy within apparently neutral technical and financial rationalities.

This exposes municipal governance discourse that employs deception, misinformation and disinformation to position broader patterns of austerity and infrastructural precarity in narrow terms.

For councillors and the public, such framing reduces policy debates to technical “choices within constraint” rather than opening space to expose and debate the political and social construction of urban renewal and municipal finances.

The city is now poised to raise taxes to reproduce roads in a manner that has historically manufactured preventable problems, and position our roads to be in the same (or worse) condition in a decade than they are today.

To achieve this outcome, the city intends to spend nearly half a billion taxpayer dollars ($481M - $331M additional spending and $150M opportunity losses) over the next decade.

This approach rejects Einstein's criticism: Doing then same thing over and over again and expecting different results is foolish.

We argue that public funding would be better spent on important local issues such as housing and food insecurity, crime prevention, climate change solutions, poverty elimination, mental illness and addiction prevention and cost of living supports, while improving the condition and roles of our roads through better transportation planning.

This motion and report are not neutral technical documents but ideological artifacts of disinformation that drive fiscal conservatism, privilege technocratic expertise, and marginalise broader social concerns, including the expansion and reproduction of many forms of structural inequality by the city, whether deliberate or not.

The report is driving an ideological campaign of disinformation; unimpeded mobility for drivers at taxpayer and citizen expense. That's patently impossible, fiscally reckless, and highly inequitable.

There are many other options.

Unless such ideological framings are exposed, policy debates will remain confined to narrow financialist paradigms, limiting the community’s capacity to envision and pursue equitable, sustainable infrastructure investments.

Seven years and a wasted $105M later, the Crane Institute again calls on the city to put the brakes on all capital road funding until a plan has been developed to preserve and protect our roads through equitable and sustainable infrastructure that will not compromise the fiscal integrity of the city or safety of road users.