I fully expect the usual auto-response disclaimer about the City's inability to keep up with the needed repairs, saying, ""We will do our best to respond in a timely manner"? That's nonsense! There's been no adequate response to a history of complaints stretching back over ten years.

I'm convinced that this neglect is deliberate! The City leaves the potholes and lets the street deteriorate until we beg them to do SOMETHING -- which turns out to be something else, because what they want to do is not to meet existing needs for maintenance or repair.

In this instance, the plan (the "Oakland-Alameda Access Project," in conjunction with the Alameda County Transportation Commission) is to demolish the 880-Broadway off-ramp and to transform 6th Street into a major thoroughfare, a frontage road that would be rammed through to Broadway.

Until then, we get flimsy patches here and there if we're lucky, as the street is held h0stage and the potholes proliferate.

(Meanwhile, on Telegraph, the scheme is for a "road diet" that will eliminate passing lanes and force traffic into a single-file stop-and-go crawl. There, too, the pavement has deteriorated for years. These debacles are anything but mere coincidence!)

We deserve better than a $435 million backlog of complaints, and a Transportation Department that thinks its job is to "get people out of their cars"!

A couple of patches have been made to the very worst of the holes, but the entire block remains horribly rutted, and numerous holes and cracks in the pavement remain. This is unacceptable. Please get serious about fixing it!

Would this matter get the attention it deserves if I pointed out that the problem also endangers people on bikes? ;-)