[N/A] City Road Repair

ARFlyer

ARFlyer

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ARFlyer
We've gotten about 8" of rain in the past three days with another 2" coming. This hasn't been to kind to our roads. The main road I take once I get into town is now so full of potholes that it covers entire lanes.

Why the f$&# do cities not properly resurface roads? The entire issue is that the most recent paving job litterely floated away.

These potholes extend down to last years old pavement which is still complete with lane marking paint. It's like driving on my gravel driveway...

A European friend told me that whenever a road gets repaired in Germany they dig up the entire road section and replace it. Here they just cold patch it until they do their semiannual repaving. So that pothole they didn't properly fix is now going to be even deeper next year!!

It just seems a waste of my tax money to continually repave roads instead of fixing the actual issue.
 
They actually milled our roads down before repaving and cut out some of the bad areas. But then (with the exception of a bridge), they chipsealed it, essentially dropping fine gravel over tar and then letting the cars work it in. It's dusty, noisy, and it's failing already.
 
How would the local contractors make any money if they do it right the first, second, or third time? I think the construction racket is one of the biggest fleece jobs ever on the American public.
 
ARFlyer said:
We've gotten about 8" of rain in the past three days with another 2" coming. This hasn't been to kind to our roads. The main road I take once I get into town is now so full of potholes that it covers entire lanes.

Why the f$&# do cities not properly resurface roads? The entire issue is that the most recent paving job litterely floated away.

These potholes extend down to last years old pavement which is still complete with lane marking paint. It's like driving on my gravel driveway...

A European friend told me that whenever a road gets repaired in Germany they dig up the entire road section and replace it. Here they just cold patch it until they do their semiannual repaving. So that pothole they didn't properly fix is now going to be even deeper next year!!

It just seems a waste of my tax money to continually repave roads instead of fixing the actual issue.
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I think you hit it with your last line. Money..... Would a 4.9% increase in property taxes be ok to everyone to completely repave the roads.?

The county here did the cheap repave job, pour down tar and put gravel on top of it. And the road is worse than it was before. Actually there wasn't anything wrong with the old pavement, except the one truck driver that drives his 18 wheeler home every day on a weight restricted road. I am sure he is more than 36,000 over the road load limit, but the county doesn't seem to care. Small town attitude, I guess.
 
ARFlyer said:
We've gotten about 8" of rain in the past three days with another 2" coming. This hasn't been to kind to our roads. The main road I take once I get into town is now so full of potholes that it covers entire lanes.

Why the f$&# do cities not properly resurface roads? The entire issue is that the most recent paving job litterely floated away.

These potholes extend down to last years old pavement which is still complete with lane marking paint. It's like driving on my gravel driveway...

A European friend told me that whenever a road gets repaired in Germany they dig up the entire road section and replace it. Here they just cold patch it until they do their semiannual repaving. So that pothole they didn't properly fix is now going to be even deeper next year!!

It just seems a waste of my tax money to continually repave roads instead of fixing the actual issue.
Click to expand...

You’re lucky- the roads in the town where I live haven’t been paved since 1970. And it looks/ feels like it, too.
 
A long time ago KS rebuilt a lot of miles of interstate around KC. The joke here was, "The sun will burn out in 4 billion years so they'll have to finish I-35 in the dark."

They dug way down into the dirt, put a heavy underlayment, then topped it with a very thick concrete layer. The idea was to "do it right, do it once." Unfortunately, concrete gets potholes, too. Repairing that was a lot more expensive and labor intensive than asphalt.
 
My favorite pothole was in a parking lot I use. It was big enough, deep enough, and full of enough water that it attracted geese.
 
Zeldman said:
I think you hit it with your last line. Money..... Would a 4.9% increase in property taxes be ok to everyone to completely repave the roads.?
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That's the irk...we DO pay taxes to supposedly among other things maintain our infrastructure but the elected twits keep diverting funds to non essential pet projects and freebies leaving the roads to crumble.

Meanwhile all our cars are getting tore up.

I drive LOT and and pay a LOT in both State and Federal gas taxes which I would not mind one bit as a heavy user of said infrastructure if all the funds actually went to maintaining that infrastructure...but nope, most of that revenue just gets siphoned off into the General Fund...then we get taxed for more road maintenance cuz there is "not enough money".
 
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Michigan's claim to fame:

We have the biggest and most destructive potholes in the country. Destroyed tires and wheels are keeping shops busy during pothole season and this year has been a doozy.
 
Where i used to live, every fall the road crew would repaint the white line down the sides of the roads, to help ghe plow drivers in the winter. They would apparently make notes, because every year the pavement repair crew would be along shortly, fixing and repaving the crumbling shoulders of the roads. Then the paint crew would come back and paint the white stripe on the repaired sections . . . .
 
Hank S said:
Where i used to live, every fall the road crew would repaint the white line down the sides of the roads, to help ghe plow drivers in the winter. They would apparently make notes, because every year the pavement repair crew would be along shortly, fixing and repaving the crumbling shoulders of the roads. Then the paint crew would come back and paint the white stripe on the repaired sections . . . .
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Sounds like a good steady job...:lol::lol:
 
There is an easy way to not worry about asphalt potholes. Just move to somewhere where it’s dirt. :)
 
denverpilot said:
There is an easy way to not worry about asphalt potholes. Just move to somewhere where it’s dirt. :)
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Or to the south, except for the every 10 years when we do get snow and the local government doesn't know what to do...we still had ice on our roads 3 days after it snowed last month o_O
 
Apologies on the late reply I've been at work. Seems like a universal issue. When I called the city to report the issue they just shrugged it off. I've been told by friends around the state that the roads are in horrible shape after this weeks rain.
 
Matthew K said:
Or to the south, except for the every 10 years when we do get snow and the local government doesn't know what to do...we still had ice on our roads 3 days after it snowed last month o_O
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Three whole days? The mind boggles.
 
I've heard if you spray paint di*ks on the pot holes the city will fix them faster. Might be no truth to that but something about di*ks on city roads makes the city unappealing. At the very least it makes your commute a little more entertaining.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
 
With enough excuses, (fuel efficient vehicles today use less fuel, hence, less motor fuel tax, etc...), and allowing road maintenance to go far enough downhill, our politicians will eventually have the leverage needed to proceed with their plans for the per mile usage road tax proposal. Every vehicle will be fitted with a tracking system that will record movement, and then bill for usage.
It will be similar to what they will have when they finally admit failure, stop adding bandaids, and then proceed to properly reengineer this crappy and fundamentally flawed adsb system that they're pushing on us.
 
Matthew K said:
Or to the south, except for the every 10 years when we do get snow and the local government doesn't know what to do...we still had ice on our roads 3 days after it snowed last month o_O
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We have ****ty roads too. They built a highway 2 years ago on a time crunch and now it’s buckling so bad that cars bottom out and dig into the asphalt
 
51b45258b2b94efdc5ebeb4fb595a139.jpg
 
ktup-flyer said:
We have ****ty roads too. They built a highway 2 years ago on a time crunch and now it’s buckling so bad that cars bottom out and dig into the asphalt
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No doubt. The road to my house I'm not even sure can be considered paved anymore from how much its crumbled, especially now with the ice freezing into it multiple times earlier this year. Many roads in my county are in a similar state as well.
 
Norman said:
Michigan's claim to fame:

We have the biggest and most destructive potholes in the country. Destroyed tires and wheels are keeping shops busy during pothole season and this year has been a doozy.
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Car & Driver magazine does long term tests of cars, and I am amazed at the number of wheels and tires they say they replace.
 
Pennsylvania potholes
 

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Ken Ibold said:
Car & Driver magazine does long term tests of cars, and I am amazed at the number of wheels and tires they say they replace.
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Interesting that you mention that, I’ve been wishing for them or someone to do a long term test but add at least ten miles of washboarded dirt roads to it per day.

The most annoying thing about living at the end of a dirt road is crappy fit and finish of internal plastic parts in the interior of our vehicles. Some of the vehicles don’t squeak, rattle, or make any noises or lose plastic pieces under severe daily vibration, and others are a squeaky, poppy, rattle can, disaster.

And nobody does that test.

I’d be buying the vehicles that DON’T have interiors that make crap tons of noises after a year or two of daily washboard driving, if I could figure out which vehicles are built well enough to not do it.

The Subaru is pretty good but some pieces fall off.

The GMC is by far the worst, pieces rattle loose, screws back out, and everything from the sunroof to the floor trim, makes noises.

The Dodge is pretty good but there’s a few noises and the passenger door lost a trim piece.

The Lincoln is the top of ours as far as feeling the most solid, but the dash parts still makes noises.
 
They actually do a pretty good job on the roads where I live considering the temperature extremes. They're also pretty quick about it on the Village- and County-maintained roads. A year or two ago every road in the Village was resurfaced, and it only took three or four days, with no complete road shutdowns. The County also resurfaced a roughly 10-mile road that meanders its way over the mountain in about the same amount of time. So the Village and County guys move along pretty well on the roads that they maintain.

The State-maintained roads, not so much. They usually do a decent job, but they milk them. I'd say they take roughly 10 times as long as the Village or County would to complete the same work, with a commensurate increase in inconvenience to the public. That's probably because the Village and County highway department heads are elected. The State guys aren't.

When the feds get involved, fugghedabouddit. A dinky little bridge over the East Branch of the Delaware River (which is little more than a creek and is not navigable at that point) took six years to re-open after it was damaged by Irene, all because the feds were involved. The actual work took about a month and was completed by the village. The six years prior were spent filing paperwork to get the bazillion approvals that were needed to do the work.

Most roads around here get 10-year complete rebuilds (I'm sure there's an official term for it, but I don't know what it is offhand) where they dig down and fix or replace the substrate before resurfacing. In between, they patch holes and resurface as needed, but they do a decent-enough job of it. I rarely find myself cursing the roads like I did when I lived in The City.

The roads that hold up the longest are actually the ones where they just pack gravel into the soil and steamroll it. Those roads rarely get potholes, for reasons that I don't understand. Maybe the water percolates through the gravel and exits through the sides of the road before it gets a chance to refreeze.

Rich
 
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