In order to maintain the quality of roads, the city tries to repave a thousand lane miles each year. (A lane mile is a measurement that accounts for roads with multiple lanes.) The city recently announced that because of lower oil prices and good weather, it had exceeded its goal and resurfaced 1,281 lane miles in fiscal year 2016.

Reconstruction and Repaving

Driving or cycling on a freshly paved road is a rare thrill in New York City.

When determining which streets will get a face-lift, Galileo Orlando, the deputy commissioner for roadway repair and maintenance, said officials considered the needs of each community board, as well as current underground construction projects , like the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan. They also check who controls the road — the city, the state or a private owner — and its quality rating.

“You don’t repave a street that’s too good, and you don’t repave a street that’s really bad because the resurfacing is not going to do much if it’s beyond its useful life,” Mr. Orlando said.

Resurfacing cost the city an average of $195,000 per lane mile in fiscal year 2015, according to the Transportation Department.

In Tokyo, many streets are made entirely of asphalt. But in New York, most streets are made of a six-to-eight-inch concrete base, which provides stability and structural integrity, and a four-to-six-inch layer of asphalt, which is less expensive and provides a smoother ride.

This year, the city anticipates using 1.34 million tons of asphalt to repave roads. Stones, called aggregate, arrive on barges from upstate quarries and are crushed and mixed with sticky asphalt cement, a byproduct of the oil refining process, which acts like glue.

Before a street is repaved, the existing asphalt is ground up, a process called milling, which eliminates defects and re-establishes the rise in the middle of the street to allow proper water drainage. Some of the old asphalt is reused to fill potholes or new roads. A freshly paved street contains an average of 35 percent recycled asphalt.

Utility companies and others are encouraged to make upgrades or repairs to underground infrastructure while the road is under construction, Mr. Orlando said.

For five years after a resurfacing, a street is given a protected status by the department. Utilities and contractors must pay more to dig into the road, and face stiffer penalties for shoddy restoration.

Over the past two decades, the city has fallen short of its annual goals, so Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, recently earmarked $1.6 billion to catch up over the next 10 years. But Mr. Riccio, the former transportation commissioner who is known as Professor Pothole, said the city should actually pave at least 1,200 miles a year. Major roadways or highways should be resurfaced every 8 to 10 years, he said, and side streets every 15 to 20 years.

While repaving is a good cosmetic fix, road reconstruction is a more significant step that involves rebuilding from the ground up. Only a tiny portion of streets each year are reconstructed. The process can be 10 times more expensive and can take several years. (East Houston Street, for example, has been undergoing reconstruction since 2010.) Often, the reason for a reconstruction isn’t the quality of the road, but a major project like installing express bus lanes or replacing a century-old water tunnel. Underground infrastructure is upgraded at the same time.

Mr. Ng, the city infrastructure official, said people always ask: “Why do you keep coming back to dig up the street?”

Like constructing a building, he said, it must be done in stages.

“You can’t have everyone standing in the same trench all the time,” he said. “It’s an organized chaos.”

Since the late 1970s, the city and utility companies have been experimenting with what are known as trenchless technologies, like remote-controlled tunnel boring machines, to minimize the invasiveness of certain work, and to reduce disruptions to pedestrians and drivers. Other recent innovations, like removable concrete slabs, allow utilities to make repairs quickly, without damaging the surrounding pavement. But there is a limit to what even perfect planning and engineering techniques can accomplish.

“If we could go back in time, utilities would be put elsewhere,” Mr. Riccio said. “But we’re stuck with the city we have.”