I think they should have included the official NYC procedure, which is:
1. Dig out around the affected area
2. leave massive dent in the surface for what seems like years
3. Maybe cover it with a few janky bits of wood and/or metal sheets that make a hideous clanking noise all day and night and have the same approximate surface friction as an ice rink so are pretty murderous to any 2-wheeled road user
4. Leave this solution to mature like a fine wine
5. I really mean single malt whiskey. You can leave it basically as long as you like
Whoa, fancy. All we get are open pits with a few barricades around them until the news finally starts talking about the tree growing in the middle of the road.
My understanding is the DOT gets pissy if locals fill in the pothole themselves, but I imagine that there's enough interested people to do vigilante road repair if they weren't subject to government harrassment.
nobody leaves a dent in the surface on purpose, the problem is that whatever caused the pothole is almost certainly still causing it to sink under the surface. A patch doesn't fix the problem, it just makes it less bad.
The local obscenely named utility company dug in our road a few years ago, necessitating a large patch. They proceeded to drive through their patch as they left. The tire dents & ridges are still there years later. You're right, of course, but I think you may be overestimating the concern patch crews give to their craft.
I like Atlanta’s solution even better: after becoming egregious enough sloppily bolt down a much too tall metal plate over the pothole and those that have proliferated nearby. Cross fingers and hope they won’t coalesce as a sink hole and as with everything else: “Go Dawgs”
The root of the problem (literally) is that when potholes appear it's mostly because what's under became too porous and humid so what's over it separates easily. Patching the hole isn't a good fix but the alternative is closing roads which wrecks the economy. The other problem is that the public always asks: "why isn't it patched ?" and if you don't do it you look like you're not competent enough to be in charge. And the cycle continues.
And when you go to your local government, demand a fix, they'll contract a union shop to do the work, often mandated by law, and they will advocate for the least durable, most expensive fix, so as to ensure recurring work happens at a maximum frequency. Attention to certain roads, duration of work is often politicized - someone with good friends gets quick, top tier fixes, but someone who annoys the local council might see months of roadwork dragging on forever, or halfassed repairs, or potholes ignored for years.
Lovely little civilization we have, eh?
edit: Huh, must be nice to live in places where that apparently doesn't happen? It's been a comically recurring theme in nearly every city I've lived in - potholes weren't just potholes, they were favors and tools and penalties and grifts. If you've never seen this happen, I'd recommend digging a bit deeper. Very few places have their collective shit together sufficiently to handle the relatively small problems like potholes very well. If your community does, then kudos!
It depends entirely on where you live. My city has its own asphalt batch plant and they spend a few weeks every late winter/early spring repairing potholes.
Also, union labor is not mandatory for public work, but the prevailing wage scales that contractors are required to pay their workers do line up pretty closely to the actual union wages. It’s a good thing that people get paid a living wage, in my opinion. There are a lot of facilities that require union labor for certain trades due to the risk involved: mechanical, electrical, and plumbing for the most part.
Philadelphia is blessed by several feet of sub-street layers (stone fill, belgian block, concrete backfill, and terrible asphalt), embedded rail, pipes, and utilities that are all owned and managed by different local, state, and private entities. Oh and fairly wide temperature swings throughout the year, generous precipitation, salt, and let's not forget the drivers themselves. It's a miracle the roads are in as good a shape as they are - but it does have a traffic calming effect :)
I've literally watched them approach a pothole full of water, blow the water out with compressed air, retract the blower while the pothole refills, excrete asphalt mix into the watery hole then pat it down and compress it with a roller -- then proceed to the next pothole, driving over and denting the just-"repaired" one.
Even in the video it looks like it does a terrible job. Hilariously he drives past all the other potholes that was just shown at the beginning of the video.
I wonder if there are existing data sources that could be used to implement an optimal pot hole patching priority lists at scale.
Identify pot hole locations. Combine with traffic metrics for those locations. Then use a combination of some pot hole nuisance metric (size, depth, location in lane, number of cars that could hit it per unit time based on traffic metrics), a cost to repair for a given repair type metric (should include traffic disruption cost estimates), then have an estimate for future degradation if it is not repaired and the cost of that applied at a few time points .... I'm sure there are plenty of implementations of various versions of the algorithm, but I wonder whether there are open data sources ....
A quick search suggests that most approaches are municipality based crowd sourcing efforts. A stream from the radars from various vehicles could provide something that was up-to-date enough to avoid false positives that had already been fixed .... Things like streetview and various aerial photography datasets probably update too slowly ... though I know of some potholes that have existed through multiple recaptures.
I guess the days of citizens grabbing their shovels and going to fix the roads are becoming a thing of the past. Which is a shame because the total cost of asphalt needed to fix most potholes is less than the cost of a single tire repair.
Reading all of the crabby comments about pothole repair make me feel great about my city in MN. Leave voice mail about pothole on my way to work in morning, pothole filled when I return home in the afternoon.
Readit News
1. Dig out around the affected area
2. leave massive dent in the surface for what seems like years
3. Maybe cover it with a few janky bits of wood and/or metal sheets that make a hideous clanking noise all day and night and have the same approximate surface friction as an ice rink so are pretty murderous to any 2-wheeled road user
4. Leave this solution to mature like a fine wine
5. I really mean single malt whiskey. You can leave it basically as long as you like
6. There is no step six.
People in Chicago sometimes do this.
It's common enough that WGN Morning News parodied it by having its sports anchor go out and start filling potholes with giardiniera.
https://wgntv.com/video/pat-fills-potholes-with-giardiniera/...
Lovely little civilization we have, eh?
edit: Huh, must be nice to live in places where that apparently doesn't happen? It's been a comically recurring theme in nearly every city I've lived in - potholes weren't just potholes, they were favors and tools and penalties and grifts. If you've never seen this happen, I'd recommend digging a bit deeper. Very few places have their collective shit together sufficiently to handle the relatively small problems like potholes very well. If your community does, then kudos!
Also, union labor is not mandatory for public work, but the prevailing wage scales that contractors are required to pay their workers do line up pretty closely to the actual union wages. It’s a good thing that people get paid a living wage, in my opinion. There are a lot of facilities that require union labor for certain trades due to the risk involved: mechanical, electrical, and plumbing for the most part.
1. Do nothing for 9 months. This allows the pothole to mature until ready for step 2.
2. Put a traffic cone in the pothole.
3. After a couple weeks of public notice (traffic cone) dump hot asphalt into the hole, making sure to top off several inches above street level.
4. DO NOT WAIT for asphalt to cool down before opening the street. This allows for asphalt to stick to tires, shoes etc.
5. Make sure to leave a significant bump and don't compact the asphalt so next winter it will open up again.
6. Make sure to put any utility covers (manholes, drains etc) directly in the wheel path for maximum damage.
7. Profit!
I've literally watched them approach a pothole full of water, blow the water out with compressed air, retract the blower while the pothole refills, excrete asphalt mix into the watery hole then pat it down and compress it with a roller -- then proceed to the next pothole, driving over and denting the just-"repaired" one.
Identify pot hole locations. Combine with traffic metrics for those locations. Then use a combination of some pot hole nuisance metric (size, depth, location in lane, number of cars that could hit it per unit time based on traffic metrics), a cost to repair for a given repair type metric (should include traffic disruption cost estimates), then have an estimate for future degradation if it is not repaired and the cost of that applied at a few time points .... I'm sure there are plenty of implementations of various versions of the algorithm, but I wonder whether there are open data sources ....
A quick search suggests that most approaches are municipality based crowd sourcing efforts. A stream from the radars from various vehicles could provide something that was up-to-date enough to avoid false positives that had already been fixed .... Things like streetview and various aerial photography datasets probably update too slowly ... though I know of some potholes that have existed through multiple recaptures.
0. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10636488 1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2023.103335
I guess the days of citizens grabbing their shovels and going to fix the roads are becoming a thing of the past. Which is a shame because the total cost of asphalt needed to fix most potholes is less than the cost of a single tire repair.
There is a great documentary on the Quebec situation around potholes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOOgJID6sac
In short: politicians would rather direct funds to build new roads (and get votes) than to fix existing roads (and lose votes).
It is that simple.