You had to laugh.
Springtime in Toronto is always… interesting when it comes to our roadways. No city is immune to potholes but every year, Toronto’s potholes are increasingly epidemic. Here’s why you had to laugh: City Councillor Karen Stintz has proposed corporate-sponsored road repair in the city:
“People realize and they know that the potholes are bad and the roads need to be fixed and we do have budget problems,” the Eglinton-Lawrence rep admitted. “So if we can be creative around how we solve it, it’s better for the citizens, it’s better for the streets and it’s better for City Hall.”
But the Mayor is (rightly) skeptical:
“I wouldn’t want the city to be dependant on a boon year in auto sales, therefore your roads get fixed,” [Mayor David] Miller said. “You need to repair the roads properly, it’s something that should be paid for through the property tax system.”
A couple of weeks earlier, CITYnews covered the pothole situation in Toronto with a quote from dreamboat Councillor Glenn Debaeremaeker:
“You can be on a road with no potholes Monday and Wednesday there’s a pothole.”
Indeed. But CITYnews explains away the pothole situation in a manner not unlike the way we often hear summer=hot explained (“the Earth’s position causes warmer temperatures because it’s closest to the Sun during summer”):
Potholes are a reality for an aging city infrastructure that contends annually with wild fluctuations in temperature which force concrete to expand and contract as water enters the cracks and seasons shift.
Which is to say… yeah, but… no. (The Earth’s tilt causes warmer temperatures in summertime, by the way; it’s as far from the sun during the summer as it is in winter).
The large fluctuation in temperatures is problematic for Toronto, and does deteriorate concrete and asphalt through water freezing and thawing and then the cracks and the potholes and the frustration.
And it’s frustration not just for motorists concerned about the assault on their suspensions. Cyclists are rightfully enraged by the increased danger caused by swerving to avoid potholes. And pedestrians in downtown Toronto are well acquainted with rainwater collected in the potholes and projected toward the sidewalks by typically-conscientious downtown motorists.
But I hafta tell you… that Civil Engineering degree doesn’t hang above my toilet for spending four years in art college, and Toronto doesn’t have a really shitty pothole situation because of our freeze-thaw cycling; Toronto has a really shitty pothole situation because the repairs are not made properly. I’ve actually observed several road-repair crews in action in the downtown core.
And this is what I saw:
- Road-repair crews in Toronto use shockingly substandard asphalt. Asphalt is a concrete-like mixture of gravel, sand and viscous, bitumen (think: tar) and its quality and longevity depends very much on the proper proportion of each, combined under heat to make the bitumen flow better. There are cheats, of course, such as using solvents to avoid the heating of the mixture.
If you guessed that cheats are used in Toronto, you’re on the right track, but it’s not just cheating. No, the asphalt used in much of the repairs to Toronto’s roads barely has enough bitumen to hold the gravel together, too. Predictably, it starts to spall within hours of application. - The asphalt is applied by crews without proper equipment or training. On the two most recent occasions I’ve witnessed pothole repairs, the crew consisted of two workers, shoveling shitty “asphalt” from the back of a pick-up truck, stepping on it, then tamping it down with the back of their spades. Use a roller to smooth it over? As. IF.
Making matters worse is that not enough asphalt is used to even fill in the holes completely. Within hours, the edges of the repairs are pressed back down into the potholes. - If the pothole repairs are supervised and/or inspected after the repairwork, someone needs to lose their supervisor and/or inspector jobs. I’ve never seen supervision or inspection.
If Toronto can’t afford road repairs to the extent that we need corporate sponsorship, maybe we should think about doing the repairwork properly the first time around. So, please, CITYnews, stop with the bullshit explaining-away of our crappy road situation with that specious nonsense about freeze-thaw cycles. Because… yeah. BUT NO.
ADDENDUM: Then and Now…
Hey, remember this repairwork, reported here in early 2008?
Well, a month after I posted that photo, the asphalt was repaired. A year later? This:
One Year Later (click to enlarge)
Oy. And vey.
6 comments
So you must be the only gay in the village who understands asphalt. If the past way of doing things is a failure, turn it over to the private sector and have public money spent monitoring the asphalt quality.
Any man who uses the term “spall” in a complete sentence… Woof!!!
As bad as a pothole problem may be for cars and pedestrians, it is difficult to describe how bad it is for someone using a wheelchair. It can be bad enough to tip a person out of his or her chair – and if you use a seatbelt on your chair, when you are tossed out of the chair, the chair follows and falls on top of you. When you consider that motorised chairs often weigh 160 pounds or more, that is no joke.
When you already have paralysis and osteoporosis, what you need is a nice flip into the street and your wheelchair falling on top of you – fun in Toronto!
This was illuminating. I’ve long wondered why the city does temporary repairs to potholes, rather than just fixing them, but I assumed that the temporary fillings were emergency ones intended to keep traffic moving until the real crews could fix the holes. Now you tell me that what I thought were “temporary repairs” are actually the permanent repairs? Things are even worse than I realized.
Huh. Interesting.
Is this just crazy talk, or would it work out a lot cheaper in the medium-to-long-term if you did the repairs properly?
Perth doesn’t have the kind of temperature cycle Toronto does, not by a mile, so I grant that our roads are probably a lot easier to build for, but potholes on major roads just don’t happen here. When the asphalt on a road cracks, the cracks are sealed with black goo that hardens (tar? bitumen? I have no idea) until the road is resurfaced (which happens every few years or decades, depending on how much traffic the road gets). People complain about the fact that our roads are a bit bumpy in places, but the surfaces themselves are always fine.
It just seems like it shouldn’t be that hard.
[...] how I was telling you about the incompetent pothole repair crews: On the two most recent occasions I’ve witnessed [...]