Hayward car enthusiast Jermaine Shaffer remembers the pothole on Hesperian Boulevard that used to slam his 1947 Chevrolet Fleetline to the asphalt, chipping the onyx-colored fender and hood that he put together himself.
However, in the past five years, the city of Hayward has made strides to improve its most used and deteriorated roads, and Shaffer — along with the rest of the East Bay’s classic car community — has felt the difference in his own smooth rides.
“That’s a big deal to not have to dodge potholes in the street. My car is a 1940s Fleetline and it doesn’t feel good on those bumps,” Shaffer said. “It’s too expensive to fix, so you have to preserve what you have.”
In November, the Metropolitan Transportation Committee released its annual report on Bay Area road conditions. While the average road conditions across the Bay Area have remained stagnant for the past 10 years with a “fair” score of 67/100, Hayward has raised its grade – known as a Pavement Condition Index, or PCI – each of the past five years since the city council voted to emphasize improving street conditions with a new road improvement program.
“The biggest one would be Mission Boulevard,” Hayward Public Works Director Alex Ameri said. “It goes all the way from Rose (Street) to the border of Union City. That’s a long roadway that we did in three phases, and that was just completed.”
While the road grades for most Bay Area cities have remained stagnant, Hayward‘s grade for its 292 miles of roads jumped from 69/100 in 2019 to 78 in 2025, according to MTC. Though the city had traditionally relied on the public to respond to problematic road conditions, Armeri said, it has embraced Street Saver, a software which tracks which neighborhoods have received their “fair share” of road care.
“Hayward has attracted the attention of our crew,” MTC spokesperson John Goodwin said. “Street saver allows a city like Hayward to predict the deterioration of a given stretch of pavement, and then make decisions on how best to use the available budget.”
This past year, Hayward — using a combination of the county’s Measure BB revenue, the state gas tax and the California Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017 — spent $12.5 million on repairs across 65 roads. One of those roads, Winton Avenue, is outside Shaffer’s auto body shop where he stores his ‘47 Fleetline until its ready to roll out the black beauty with wood-trim suicide doors.
“Winton right here, yeah, that was horrible before,” Shaffer said. “This is 100% better than it was, because before it was like land mines driving in and out.”
Other Bay Area cities have noted even larger improvements, such as Larkspur in Marin County, which received a PCI score of 87 in 2024, up from 65 in 2020. However, Goodwin noted, Larkspur has only 65.8 lane miles of roads to manage. Hayward, meanwhile, has nearly 5 times the number of street miles as Larkspur.
Each of the Bay Area’s three largest cities registered modest improvements in its PCI scores between 2020 and 2024, with San Jose improving from 66 to 73; San Francisco rising from 74 to 75; and Oakland rising from 55 to 58, according to MTC reports. In addition to the top-performing city of Larkspur, the best roads in Bay Area included Palo Alto, Cupertino and Los Altos Hills in the South Bay, and the East Bay cities of Orinda and Hillborough.
Low-riders may want to avoid the worst roads in the Bay Area that are considered “at-risk,” graded between 50-70, or “poor,” which includes any city with a grade below 50. Pacifica in San Mateo County and Petaluma in Sonoma County both rank second-worst with PCI scores of 50. The worst roads across the region by far are found in Vallejo, which recorded a score of 44, according to the MTC.
Hayward’s city council set a goal of raising its PCI score to 80 in 2019. If successful, the “Heart of the Bay” would have the smoothest rides in the Bay Area.
“Consistent investment in roadway maintenance and repair will yield results, and that’s true in Larkspur, just as it is in Hayward, just as it is in San Jose,” Goodwin said. “Certainly, it would be encouraging if we had all 109 jurisdictions following the Hayward track of improvement.”
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