Toronto missing its targets when it comes to repairing potholes on time: report

Potholes are a common sight around Toronto, and new data shows the city is missing its targets when it comes to repairing them on time. 

So far this year, the city has completed pothole service requests within its four-day target less than half of the time for local roads and 27 per cent of the time for expressways, according to a report presented to the city's service excellence committee on Monday. 

That's an improvement from last year, when the service standard was met 16 per cent of the time for local roads and 15 per cent for expressways. 

But it's a decline from 2021, when the city met its target 94 per cent of the time for expressway repairs and 66 per cent of the time for local roads. 

City staff say that's not a fair comparison because it has since changed the way it measures when a service request is complete to more accurately reflect whether or not the pothole was actually filled. 

Before 2023, city staff would mark a pothole-related service request as closed once a field investigator had inspected it and addressed any safety concerns. But that didn't mean the pothole was actually filled, Barbara Gray, general manager of transportation services, told a committee meeting Monday. 

Now, the city is considering those service requests closed only when the pothole has been repaired, Gray said. 

Revising targets 

Staff are now working on revising what the benchmark should look like for pothole repairs depending on the road. Gray said that benchmark will likely be somewhere between four and 21 days. 

That would bring the city's maintenance standards more in line with the province's, which are between four to 30 days depending on the road, she said. 

Whatever that timeline is, the city wants to make sure it's realistic, said city manager Paul Johnson. 

"What we don't want to do is set an expectation that we can never seek to achieve, but the balance of that is we also can't just match it to 'Well, that's what we do,'" he said.

Ahead of Monday's meeting, committee member Coun. Paul Ainslie said if city staff want to change that standard, they'll need to justify it. 

"Whatever the target is that we're giving staff, if they want to change it I expect a very explicit rationale of why they would want to change the benchmark," Ainslie said.

Meanwhile, the city says its trending in a better direction. 

Mayor Olivia Chow pointed out the city has repaired about 53,000 more potholes this year than in did last year, with one month still to go. 

"We are getting on top of it because we're fixing more without people even asking," she said during a news conference Monday. 

Monday's service excellence committee meeting also heard that about 94 per cent of pothole service requests were completed on time in October and November of this year. 

The city says it expects to have a new service request timeline for potholes in 2025.