Highway Consolidation Study - Schoharie County

34TABLE 4 summarizes the information provided in TABLE 3. Theaverage cost per mile across all departments was about $19,500 in 2010.For towns only, the average was $14,700 and for villages it was $23,700.Table 4: Average Cost per MileCPM 2010County $29,293Town $14,689Village $23,717Countywide $19,520Departments with higher mileages tended to have lower cost-per-milefigures, suggesting that they were able to maintain more roadways withoutincreasing costs enough to significantly bump up their overall costs-permile.In 2010, the average cost per mile for departments with more than 50miles (unadjusted 9 ) was about $11,980. Table 4 combined with thisfurther analysis suggests that there are efficiencies to be gained in thesystem.This simple comparison may not tell the whole story, however, since analternative analysis could also suggest that municipalities with greater than50 centerline miles are not maintaining their roads with the same quality.Additionally, the rural nature and topography of the towns with highermiles may not demand the same level of maintenance and care (e.g. ifthere are more unpaved roads, road maintenance may not be done as oftenor cost as much).Types of road and traffic patterns may also influence costs. CGR did ananalysis of average annual daily traffic volume with available data fromNew York State Department of Transportation to learn about the impact oftraffic volume on total costs. While the results are not easily applied tothe cost per mile analysis, they are none-the-less interesting. Based uponTable 1, there is one tenth the number of Village street miles compared toCounty road miles and yet they average 25% more daily traffic per sectionthan the county roads in the network. There is nearly double the numberof town road miles than there are county road miles, and yet town roadsget only 25% of the traffic volume those county roads receive. State roadsreceive the overwhelming majority of the traffic on a daily basis.Higher traffic volumes may be contributing to higher costs due to morefrequent maintenance, higher quality materials for higher volume roads,9 Unadjusted refers to town center-line miles only. This analysis did not include anycounty center-line miles maintained by the towns.