Strong Towns argues that car-dependent development commits cities to maintenance obligations they cannot afford. The case studies are compelling, but do they apply where I live? Solvent Streets started as an attempt to answer that for Livermore, California, and turned into a general tool for asking it about any city.
The tool measures the total area of pavement in a city from open map data and then forecasts the cost of maintaining it, projecting the Pavement Condition Index forward under different maintenance strategies and budget levels. Output is a static site you can browse.
Published data
The generated site covers Livermore, CA, the city that motivated the project, plus over 270 additional cities across the US.
Pavement condition indices and city budgets are seeded where available; there is still work to do on the underlying data, and the site carries a work-in-progress banner accordingly.
Notes on the implementation
The repository follows byob-go-cli, a set of idiomatic-Go preferences that came out of this project, and a broad set of golangci-lint linters.
Links: