If it seems that Baltimore’s roads are still in rough shape headed into another pothole-inducing winter of freezes and thaws, you may be onto something. Baltimore’s transportation department made its repaving list earlier this year, but perhaps forgot to check it twice — about 77 lane miles still await new asphalt.

The Baltimore City Department of Transportation resurfaced just over 34 lane miles of roadway this year, roughly 31% of its goal, according to a Baltimore Banner analysis.

Over the course of three late-December days, a reporter visited all 100 locations on the city’s 2025 Orange Cone list, which details the road segments the transportation department plans to mill and repave with fresh asphalt in the calendar year, to check for signs that they had been completed: smooth, dark pavement; variations in color or quality from surrounding road segments; a lack of cuts or potholes.

The Banner found that a little more than half of the locations on the list had been completed.

Most of the completed roads were shorter segments on low-traffic streets, while the majority of the larger projects, on roads that see heavier traffic, were not completed.

Councilman Ryan Dorsey, who chairs City Hall’s land use and transportation committee, called the difference between the amount planned and what was actually completed “par for the course” and reflective of a broken planning and engineering process.

Council President Zeke Cohen also expressed disappointment with the progress.

“This year’s performance raises questions about the TEC division’s ability to deliver the basic street resurfacing services that Baltimoreans deserve, particularly in light of the division’s reliance on outside contractors for the design and implementation of resurfacing projects,” Cohen said in a statement. “Furthermore, the division consistently fails to follow City laws that prescribe equitable selection of resurfacing projects and safe design standards.”

Drivers tired of the wear and tear that Baltimore’s roads inflict on their cars had high hopes to start the year. The target of 111 lane miles was substantially higher than those of the previous three years, thanks to a funding increase, and was more consistent with the amount of roadway the department repaved before the pandemic.

But the department is ending the year with plenty of leftovers for 2026.

In an email, city transportation department spokesperson Kathy Dominick said that paving crews will resume unfinished projects in the spring, once warmer weather returns (asphalt doesn’t set properly when the ground is too cold). Where possible, crews will continue work with “materials that are less susceptible to temperature fluctuations,” she said.

“Due to the nature of our multi-year contracts, select projects on the 2025 Orange Cone list have projected completion dates that extend into the 2026 construction season,” Dominick wrote.

In a follow-up statement, Dominick wrote that the list “was never intended to be fully completed by the end of this calendar year.”

The Orange Cone list, which lists 110.5 lane miles of road as “under construction in 2025,” is broken into two categories. “Maintenance” projects (43 locations) are typically shorter segments of smaller, neighborhood roads handled in-house by transportation department staff. “TEC” projects (57 locations) are typically longer segments or major thoroughfares, and are completed by outside contractors.

TEC projects, so named for the department’s Transportation Engineering and Construction Division, generally require more planning and engineering, and are considered more of an in-depth reconstruction of a roadway than the basic milling and paving of a maintenance project.

The in-house crew was busy this year, completing 38 of the 43 locations — totaling just over 15 lane miles, or roughly 86% of that list. Some of those projects appear on the department’s interactive online map as “planned” and not yet completed, but the asphalt looked fresh off a construction vehicle. One project — a section of McElderry Street between Montford and North Luzerne avenues — is listed on the city’s map as complete but has clearly not seen new asphalt this year.

The TEC projects really brought down the average. As of Dec. 24, the department’s outside contractors finished work at just 14 of 57 locations, totaling 14 lane miles. That’s 15% of that list. Three were still in progress.

Of those 14 completed locations, nine were projects carried over from the 2024 list.

A list of completed projects that Dominick shared included four roads that were not on the publicly available list or the department’s interactive map: a segment of Armory Place, Moravia Road between Walther Avenue and Harford Road, a short segment of Deckerts Lane, and roughly half a mile of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard between the stadiums. In a follow-up statement, she wrote that they were completed under an “urgent need” contract.

The Banner also observed a multi-block segment of North Culver Street in West Baltimore that had been milled but was missing a top layer of asphalt. Orange cones with Department of Transportation signs placed along both sides of the roadway indicated that work would continue through Jan. 2. That road segment does not appear on the Orange Cone list.

Dorsey attributes part of the TEC Division’s struggles to a severely truncated timeline. Engineers should be identifying which road segments to repave years in advance, he said, giving them plenty of time to work through designs. Per city code, segments should be identified based on a detailed index of pavement conditions across the city, equity considerations and crash data, he said.

Instead, segments get selected late into the year with little warning.

Over the years, roadwork has become a game of political wheeling and dealing, with some City Council members lobbying for specific projects or using them as political leverage. Advocates have referred to the selection process as a sort of black box.

“We can’t pour more money into a fundamentally broken process and expect different results,” said Jed Weeks, director of the bicycle and road safety advocacy organization Bikemore. “The city is resurfacing streets before they even have a striping plan. That’s chaos, not a strategy.”

Dorsey said he has already asked the transportation department what road segments are on the 2026 list.

Asked whether the department anticipates any shake-up in how things get planned, Dominick wrote that “there are no changes as to how project locations are selected and implemented.”