About

Palo Alto maintains 473 lane-miles of streets. They are the City's most significant surface asset, and their health varies. Street condition is measured on a Pavement Condition Index (PCI) scale from 1 to 100. Streets rated 59 or lower are considered "at risk" or "poor". In 2010, Palo Alto's average rating for streets was 73, placing it below many neighboring communities rated on the same scale. At that time, 20 percent of Palo Alto's streets were rated under 60. The Palo Alto Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Commission (IBRC) report recommended that, by 2021, the City average be raised to 85 with no Palo Alto street carrying a PCI rating below 60. See the 2011 vs. 2021 PCI distribution graph from Page 39 of the report. The full IBRC report can be found here. In FY2011, City Council doubled the annual street maintenance program budget with an addition of about $2 million to allow the City to achieve this goal. The accelerated investment in our streets was accomplished without additional taxes or fees from taxpayers.

The City of Palo Alto StreetViewer application is an experimental and unique co-development between the City, Stanford University students, and software developers from the community. Using a combination of open data, a hackathon approach, and a not-for-profit partnership, this application was developed to enable the community to view any street in the City of Palo Alto and its corresponding condition rating as of 2011. In addition, the application provides a utility for uploading user-generated pictures so that a broader portfolio of visual perspectives can be associated with individual streets. A user can also compare a rating of a street and its Google Street View picture with examples of streets that rate in the lower, medium, and high range of quality. Finally, since not every street address was given a rating, the search result provides the closest street address with a rating.

Please Note:

Please be sure to enter a full Palo Alto address in the search box. Partial addresses, for example, those without a building number may not produce a search result.

This is an experimental application. It is provided as-is, with no support, and should not be used for official purposes. It is optimized for use with Internet Explorer v9 and current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Street photographs are provided by Google Maps.

Originally Posted: March 2012
Updated: October 2012