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Data brief · Marcus Johnson

Oakland's pothole season started three weeks early

Pavement requests are running 40% above the five-year average for this week of the year. The response queue is already stretching.

Marcus Johnson Filed · Aug 30, 2026 · 6:00 AM PT · 3 min read
SOURCE: OAKLAND OPEN DATA QUTH-GB8E · PULLED 2026-08-30 · METHOD v1.4 · ILLUSTRATIVE SAMPLE FIGURES
Caltrans pothole repairs on northbound Interstate 880 at High Street in Oakland
Photo: “Oakland: Caltrans pothole repairs at High Street = Northbound Interstate 880 parking lot” by allaboutgeorge via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0. Illustrative, not the reported location.

Oakland's pothole season showed up early this year. Requests began climbing in the first week of September, three weeks ahead of the usual rise in the five-year series. The count for this week is 40% above the recent average.

The 311 file splits pavement complaints across several categories. The two that belong in this story are "Pothole" and "Street Pavement Condition." Together they produced 1,142 requests in the last 30 days. That is the highest early-season total in the sample.

1,142
pavement requests in the last 30 days. Highest early-season total in the sample.

The timing changes the workload before winter arrives. At this volume, a pavement request takes a median of 9 days to reach first action. In the busiest corridors, the median stretches to 14 days. A few weeks of extra reports can turn a repair queue into a backlog.

Sobrante Park, the MacArthur corridor, and the flatlands east of Lake Merritt have the most requests in this sample. They also led the list last season. The pattern is familiar. The early start is not.

Method note. "Pothole" and "Street Pavement Condition" are separate categories in the dataset. This brief groups them because both feed the city's road-repair queue. The city reclassified several street categories in 2024, so earlier figures are not directly comparable.

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