A report issued by the Office of the New York State Comptroller in January 2022, Locally Owned Roads by the Numbers, discussed spending on all roads owned and maintained by local governments, as well as State and federal road aid, and the need for a comprehensive assessment of road conditions, maintenance needs and associated costs. 

The New York State Department of Transportation (DOT) has recently begun to collect data on the conditions of a subset of this group, those local roads eligible for federal funding. The data was collected in 2019 and 2020, and represents just over 25,500 lane-miles, or about 13 percent of the 192,500 locally owned lane-miles in New York State – a percentage that varies quite a bit from place to place, with many rural towns (and one entire county) having no such roads at all. 

This new data allows for an interactive visualization that shows the conditions of these federally fundable local roads for every relevant county, city, town, village and borough (see below). Unfortunately, because the dataset is limited only to federally fundable local roads, it prevents citizens from drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of local spending per lane mile or where State aid might be most appropriately shared.