The Engineer's Notebook is a shared blog for entries that don't fit into a specific CR4 blog. Topics may range from grammar to physics and could be research or or an individual's thoughts - like you'd jot down in a well-used notebook.
Frustrated with the pace of spring road repairs? How about taking matters into your own hands and fixing potholes yourself! Drivers who have threatened that they’re going to come out at night with some Kwikset and a shovel are starting to do it – and they aren’t getting arrested or fined. Mostly they get thanked.
Oakland, California
The Pothole Vigilantes are two anonymous Oakland residents who decided to talk less about the parlous condition of their city’s streets and do more to fix it. The duo started their mission in April 2019 and has filled multiple holes thus far, some at the request of followers of their Instagram site. They’ve also set up a GoFundMe site, where comments range from requests for specific hole-filling (Harold St. parallel to 580 near Fruitvale Ave is a nightmare!) to thanks (not all heroes wear capes) to comments on citizen action (sometimes we just have to take things into our own hands). The PVs held a meetup on May 16 to recruit additional amateur road repair talent.
What does Oakland city government think about this? A spokesperson for the Oakland Public Works departments pointed out that working on city streets raises safety issues. He issued a plea for citizens to be patient and to use Oakland’s 311 program to nominate their favorite craters for repair.
Indianapolis, Indiana
Two years before Oakland spawned its Pothole Vigilantes, Indianapolis birthed Open Source Roads, a group that is still fixing streets this spring. The leaders of Open Source Roads, Mike Warren and Chris Lang, are filling holes, working with volunteers and using their own or donated funds to buy materials. They taught themselves how to repair potholes by watching a YouTube video. When asked why the pair decided to take on this huge task, Lange commented that, “If the city is going to fail at their own monopoly [over road repairs], why should they have that monopoly?”
The Indianapolis Department of Public Works, like their counterpart in Oakland, expressed concern for the amateur road crew’s safety, even though the crew works when traffic is light. The DPW spokesperson also said that the city needs to know what’s going on with the city infrastructure.
Portland, Oregon
This story of citizen pothole repair now moves from vigilantes to anarchists – specifically the Portland Anarchist Road Care organization, also founded in 2017. This group has a broader goal than just fixing potholes. They want to burnish the public image of anarchists and perhaps answer the classic question posed to anarchists: if government is not around to fix the roads, who will? By taking road repair into their own hands, these self-declared anarchists were living their political philosophy.
According to PARC, they exist specifically because the city government was not fixing the roads. The Portland DPW pointed out, quite rightly, that they have to wait until the outside temperature is warm enough to use hot patch repair material. The cold patch that PARC, Open Source Roads and the PVs use is much less durable. PARC’s Facebook page hasn’t had traffic in at least a year, so either they’ve patched all of Portland’s potholes or they’ve moved on to some other form of anarchist activity.
And then there’s Domino’s Pizza
PARC claims that Domino’s Paving for Pizza campaign is a total ripoff of their idea, a somewhat disingenuous statement since PARC admitted that their work was inspired by an earlier Portland organization, PDX Transformation, which placed traffic cones around bike paths. According to Domino’s Paving for Pizza map, they have issued $5,000 pothole-patching grants to communities in 16 states with 18 more slated to start soon. Domino’s grants fund municipal public works departments to do the work, using the same patch material and process the departments use for non-grant-funded repairs. The upside: the grant money plugs holes in municipal repair budgets so more holes get fixed. The downside: no repairs take place until the weather is warm enough for hot patch, and each pothole gets a Domino’s brand painted on it. It’s all one big advertisement, but when budgets are tight, $5,000 is $5,000. And maybe an early example of a public-private infrastructure project.
Image credit: Milford, Delaware Dept. of Public Works
Creative uses for potholes
Image credit: Plumtree Community via Twitter
Can't get anything done about your favorite tire shredder? Check out some creative ways citizens highlight the good side of potholes. One pothole celebrated its first birthday with balloons and its two little brother pothole and a British celebrant stuffed its yawning maw with a delicious-looking pastry. When the latter celebration failed to incite local authorities to action, concerned citizens called in Bob the Builder and a bunch of toy trucks.
Is it worth it?
Is do-it-yourself pothole repair a good idea? If private pothole filling spurs the local DPW to take action and fulfill its mission to fix the roads, maybe so. Otherwise, the very real safety concerns for amateur fillers and the lack of durability of cold patch material probably cancel out the plusses. But rogue roadwork does satisfy the urge to get something done, rather than just complaining.
Where I live, the city has an app for reporting potholes. You take a picture of it and the metadata tells them where it is and they repair it in a day or two.
Just for the record, they (DIY "Pothole Vigilantes") are alive and busy down here in Pima County, Arizona, doing what the ADOT gooberment should be doing but are too busy "improving" other things.
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Where I live... we need a better cold patch! Potholes are at the worst in late winter when it's still freezing and thawing and heaving it up. There's no sense in waiting for summer, you won't have a car to drive by then, from all the damage.
I love the idea of pothole vigilantes. Especially the anarchists - after all, if government ever fails us, the roads will be the first thing to go... unless you have enough anarchists to keep it up.
Help could be on the way. Recently reported (April 2019) research indicates that inductive hot-mix asphalt (iHMA) could be a promising replacement for cold patch asphalt. To enable road crews to heat patch material onsite in cold weather, researchers substituted steel nuggets for minerals in the patch aggregate to enable onsite induction heating. Results are promising.
I could definitely see this being an asset for airports, well worth the extra costs.
In a small town like ours, higher cost material that lasts longer would probably mean someone loses his/her job on the balance sheet. So it would have to be a low cost solution.
I could just imagine it though... pothole patches being of higher quality than the road, the next year's pothole would replace another part of the original, until finally we'd have a splendiforous road entirely made of potholes.
You could create a small [about the size of a small pickup truck] Self driving, with Flashers and Crash bumpers, low cost,pothole repair unit that swarm out at night scanning the roads for defects, do automatic quick fill repairs for the most dangerous or critical location, and create a database for the Human Crews.
"automatic quick fill repairs".... I ran into a pothole crew yesterday. They were topping up their sunken patches with a bit of loose gravel, it looked like - probably coincidental to being garbage day and the big trucks having an impact on the road. Two flag persons, two trucks/drivers, and at least two crew. 6-8 person hours per hour. And no joke they need those flag persons, we've had a couple of people killed while doing road works, when drivers didn't slow down. Obviously the self driving potholer would be way more efficient as well as safe - may even rival the efficiency of anarchists/vigilantes. (There is no real risk to anarchists, who naturally leap out of the way in case of danger ).
OTOH if anything like the vacuum and mower designs, there is a minor risk of something being unintentionally filled .
we've had a couple of people killed while doing road works, when drivers didn't slow down.
I read a lot of fire department stuff. Some of them are using about-to-be-replaced trucks as "blockers" to protect their personnel and equipment when they are working a crash/fire site on the highway. Quite a few of these blockers have been clobbered!
Around here, when they "fix" a pothole, often they just turn it upside down and make a bump out of it! In other words, they overfill it until it becomes a bump with little to no attempt at levelling.
If you leave a depression when filling a pothole, you will have standing water and then the tires that plow through the water force it downward weakening the patch material. By having the patch material proud of the surface, water cannot pool there.
When they fix potholes with hot asphalt, they run a roller over it to make it even with the surrounding road surface.
There is a trend in the UK for people to draw a phallic image with linemark (not sure of American term - it's just spraypaint) around potholes. This only happens (as far as I've seen) on minor residential roads where hazard risk of such action is minimal compared to doing nothing. Can't say I endorse that, but it does seem to get attention from the highways authority who usually correct both issues much quicker than they otherwise would.
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I believe you're referring to Pavement Artist Wansky Hey, whatever works.
Come to think of it ... I should recruit a few neighbors and give a few miles of New York Route 22 the Wansky treatment. This stretch of road has been the county's top repair priority for donkey's years yet it never gets attention.
lol - I wasn't going to be so direct, but it does seem to work . The chap certainly gets about as I've seen numerous pictures from across the UK. I've even seen cases where some anon has planted a nice shrub. The absurdity of that is that drivers will see and avoid them whilst the powers that be take longer to take a hint.
Many areas have cut down on street lighting for economic reasons, so a pothole can be a bad encounter at night. For that reason I'm fairly OK with anybody doing a DIY job.
I'll PM Tony Soprano for you re Route 22. Nobody will stop him getting artistic .
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I checked into that around here. I was informed by the local constable that even if I repaired the section of roadway in front of my property, I could be charged with vandalism. Apparently there must be some obscure law on the books.
How ironic -- vandalism for fixing, rather than breaking, something.
In theory the great state of NY is going to "repair" 10 miles of Rt. 22 closest to my house: stripping down only 3 inches and throwing some asphalt on top. Doing the job right would cost $1 million per mile ... so instead every year NYDOT will spend a little bit on cosmetic fixes that eventually will add up to more than that $10 million pricetag. Other stretches of the same road are getting decent repairs. We are left to wonder what the good citizens of Canaan and New Lebanon, NY, have done to irritate state government. Maybe some brave soul should make some graffiti in a place where the governor would have to look at it every day.
Around here, especially Canton, OH, quite a few of the streets are brick which has been in place over 100 years. Most of them, where they haven't been dug up, are in fairly good condition. But asphalt goes to pot(holes) after only a couple of years!!!
When I first moved to Pittsburgh I discovered how long-lasting AND how slick brick roads and sidewalks can be. They made good bricks back then.
Some enormous percentage of Canaan's town roads are dirt/gravel. Back in March we had so much rain and snow that a bunch of them washed out completely and a bunch of cars got stuck in muck up to 18 inches deep. The roads are all fixed now thanks to a bunch of loads of gravel. Simple and effective. I'm glad we live on a paved county road!
I think someone could make a large foam roller decal with that image on it.
Lower it and roll over pot holes en-masse.Very quick,reduces possibility of getting caught!
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"A man never stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child." "Never argue with a stupid person.They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience" "To create an apple pie from scratch, first you must create a universe"
There has been a pothole here that had a complete large traffic cone inside it!
It's gone now.
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"Did you get my e-mail?" - "The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place" - George Bernard Shaw, 1856
The DPW state that Blah blah blah...
Maybe they should spend less time issuing statements and more time repairing the roads?
Step 1. Fire the person that issued the statement and employ more road crew.
Del
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If you want a pothole repair to last a long time,clean the hole thoroughly.Heat the hole to the melting point of roofing hot-melt asphalt,and pour a thin layer of molten asphalt in the hole and on the sides.
Apply cold patch and use a vibrating compactor to pack it as tight as possible,and keep adding cold patch until level with the surrounding asphalt.Packing in this way produces a super durable patch.Feather the edges for a smooth transition from the existing pavement.A hump or hole will generate an impact from traffic that will eventually grow into another hole beside the patch.
Try it..it works very well.
HEADS UP! Public Utilities!
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"A man never stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child." "Never argue with a stupid person.They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience" "To create an apple pie from scratch, first you must create a universe"
Re: Do-It-Yourself Pothole Repairs
"Almost" Good Answers: