John Williams, center, a 13-year veteran of the city Department of Public Works, is part of a crew replacing sidewalks in the 3800 block of McGuire Drive in South Side.

This is just one of the dozens of sidewalk projects planned or underway in Richmond. One of the largest has involved the replacement of brick sidewalks on 1st Street in Gilpin Court.

Mayor Levar M. Stoney has announced that eight miles of sidewalks would be replaced or repaired now through June 30, 2022, the most in decades.

In previous years, Richmond budgeted funds to do only a little more than a mile of sidewalk replacement, making only a small dent in the six-year backlog of citizen requests.

In the 2020-2021 fiscal year that ended June 30, “we managed to replace two miles of sidewalks,” Mayor Stoney said, which exceeded the average.

He credited new funding from the Central Virginia Transportation Authority, which is collecting and distributing the additional sales and gas taxes that people pay to support GRTC and transportation projects in Richmond, seven counties and the town of Ashland.

Richmond Public Works Director Bobby Vincent Jr. said the city is investing $2.4 million this year in sidewalk work, enabling him to triple the workforce involved with sidewalks from 10 people to 30. He said he already has hired 10 new people.

With the CVTA funding projected to continue, he said he expects within two years to have sharply reduced the 2,000 citizen requests for sidewalk replacement and anticipates city residents would need to wait no more than a year to have the work done.

The city manages 832 miles of sidewalk, with most rated in good shape. A 2013 city audit indicated at least 40 miles of sidewalk needed replacement. That included locations, mostly in South Side, that needed to have sidewalks installed for the first time.

Officials said Wednesday that the city’s share of the CVTA funding is $16.7 million.

Along with sidewalks, the new source of funding is enabling the city to step up street repaving to reduce potholes. According to city figures, between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2022, the city will have repaved more than 600 lane miles of streets, or nearly 25 percent of the 2,626 lane miles it maintains.

During the next five years, funding projections suggest between 1,200 to 1,500 more lane miles of roadway would be repaved, virtually eliminating potholes.

As of August 2020, only 1,077 lane miles were rated in good to excellent condition or about 41 percent, but that appears to be changing rapidly. A lane mile is one mile of a single lane of a road.

Mr. Vincent also has noted that DPW has stepped up its work on alley improvement and is using the new funding to install hundreds of new curb ramps to make it easier for those in wheelchairs to cross streets.

“I want to make certain that we stay on top of those things,” he said.