Could rubber pave the way?

If you’re walking along the sidewalk on Sunflower Avenue in Costa Mesa and notice a bounce in your step, it’s not just your imagination.

A stretch of the pavement was recently replaced with recycled rubber tires, melted down and molded into dark gray bricks — a first for the city.

The bricks are hard, but not as rigid as cement, which makes them easier on the joints, and they are made of waste material that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Those are only icing on the cake, though.

Looking at nearby cement sidewalks in the area, it’s not hard to see the main reason the city decided to go with rubber sidewalks.

The big trees along the cement walking paths have formed impromptu hills and massive cracks in the pavement, which the city patches with clumps of black asphalt until it’s no longer tolerable. Then the whole sidewalk needs to be torn out with jackhammers and replaced from square one, costing the city a lot of money.

The rubber sidewalks, on the other hand, are flexible and don’t crack under pressure from underlying roots, so when the roots grow the city can just pick up the rubber panels and trim underneath them, costing the city practically no money.

Still, Costa Mesa isn’t ready to go out and make all of its sidewalks rubber, mainly because it costs more than twice as much to put them in — $25 per square foot of rubber versus $10 per square foot of concrete — said City Engineer Ernesto Muñoz.

“We essentially took it on as a pilot project because it’s fairly expensive, and we didn’t want to make a long-term investment in it until we saw how it worked,” Muñoz said.

This time around the city was able to fund the project completely through grants and Gas Tax funds, so it was willing to experiment. If the city finds that it can save money on routine maintenance costs then it will consider investing in more of the same, Muñoz said.

Santa Monica is credited with being the first in the state to install rubber sidewalks in 1999, and the city has put a lot of time and money into studying their effectiveness, according to Santa Monica Public Works Inspector Richard Valeriano. Before it put in rubber sidewalks, the city was continually forced to drag out heavy machinery to replace sidewalks that were torn up by the city’s enormous ficus population.

“With concrete, every six years you’re throwing another $1,000 along the street to redo 100 square feet of pavement, so the first time [you have to do maintenance] you get all your money back and the second time around you’re way ahead,” Valeriano said.

Santa Monica now uses a compound made of recycled plastic and rubber — instead of just rubber like Costa Mesa used — because the pure rubber has a couple drawbacks: It cups up at the edges trapping water in the middle, and it shrinks over time, Santa Monica has found.

The hybrid product is new, though, according to Valeriano, so most cities haven’t found out about it yet.

The rubber sidewalk in Costa Mesa cost about $77,000 and sits between two rows of trees, an ideal location to test its durability because of all of the roots around it, according to Muñoz.

Over the next few years the city will keep an eye on it, and if it performs well Costa Mesans may start to see rubber sidewalks popping up all over the area.

“It feels nice. It’s bouncy. It’s not that hard surface that you get from concrete, so it’s a little easier on your bones,” Muñoz said.

ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at [email protected].