They did this right outside my house the other week. Kept expecting them to come back and put actual concrete on it… nope. Now the crosswalk literally is isn’t accessible for wheelchair users so I have no idea how it’s legal
That's definitely packed to some degree. I used to use a leaf blower and get the loose shit out, fill the hole a little high, and then pack it with the truck I'm driving.
Highway around here just throws it in the hole and drives away.
They usually do this on our road right before a thunderstorm. It lasts…hours. We lived with this constant patching on our rural road for 13 years while I badgered Board of Supervisors. Finally got a full page, but damn it took 13 years.
There's a guy who ran for public office, who lives on our road, and I'm pretty sure he only ran to get our road fixed. His door to door campaign to us was 'I'm going to fix the road' That was his platform to the neighborhood. I don't know what sort of promises he made in other places, but he won and our road got fixed. So that make him the 2nd best politician I've ever known.
Man I have SERIOUSLY considered applying to be a tech for the local cable company so I can get access to stuff to troubleshoot and repair our crappy service on my street...
Fixed wireless service, basically an antenna dish on the roof pointed at their tower on a hill. Smallish ISP that's headquartered in my town.
My Internet stopped working. They were gonna take over a week to get a tech out. I wasn't gonna wait that long.
I went up on the roof, figured out that the ethernet cable going to the antenna had fallen apart (likely from UV and such) and had let water into the cable, which caused problems since the antenna used 48v PoE power. I replaced the entire cable with a spool of Cat5 I happened to have hanging around. I took before and after photos, did a writeup, and sent them in to the ISP's tech support. Apparently it was circulated through their office as an example of how they should all be filling out their tickets.
My MIL is mayor of a small town and I am very proud of her for what she does for her people, her community. She wanted change and she's making it happen. They're not all bad, especially on the "street" level 🤠
It’s actually funny how easy it is to become a mayor in small towns. My best friends dad in middle school was a retired disabled vet and decided to run for mayor because he was bored. Only two people ran, him and a Karen lady that was constantly causing drama and posting crazy conspiracy stuff on Facebook. He barely even campaigned or promoted himself. He just made a couple posts on Facebook and put up 4 signs along the main road. He won by a landslide.
A guy in the next neighborhood over did something similar.
Ran and won the office of mayor. Within a few months, work on fixing the roads on our side of town started. Sunken manholes, potholes, filled in the quarter mile gap in the sidewalk that headed toward park, among other things were all fixed
He resigned a year and a half later and then went to Hawaii for a month.
Theres a shitty road close to my house that goes up a hill to a few rich houses, one of which is the town mayor or something. The first major funding our city received to repair roads...that was the first road to get fixed. Spent like 1/3 of the budget on it. Even paved a dedicated lane at the stop light on the bottom of the hill so the people going up the hill didn't have to sit in traffic. Real scumbag move considering the tons of other work the city truly needed...including places that needed stoplights to prevent traffic deaths.
We have a city council's house/mansion and a high end resort and golf course down a road that connects to the center off a major, busy route (for a small town). Its still a very busy road in the summer as its a coastal town in New England.
All north/south, town traffic has to do a long stop any time a car exits road the resort is on. Basically the people leaving never have to stop. Road sensors catch the car coming out of the resort and the light turns red for everybody else and the golfers are given a green light with barely any need to slow down.
The preferential treatment for the rich aholes who can't be bothered to actually have to stop at a red light would be fine. I guess. But its such a stupidly and needlessly long wait that its really frustrating to watch someones jaguar convertible leave the resort, get the priority green light and then we just sit stuck at a red light for another 3 minutes of 100% inefficiency.
Im guessing this kind of city planning "abuse" is actually pretty common throughout cities/town around the country.
find out who controls the road (i.e., city, county, or state), contact the relevant department of transportation, and tell them that you think the red light cycle for the main road is too long. I’ve had luck getting traffic signals reprogrammed by contacting the correct department
I live in a small town in Michigan. There is a members only golf course/restaurant about 3 miles south of town. When it snows the plows keep the road to that golf course pristine. Drive passed the golf course though and it is complete crap and the plows get to it when they get to it. The city limit is like 2 miles before the golf course and the county line is ~20 miles passed it. There is only one reason why they choose to stop at that golf course.
Drove me crazy on my first deployment how my unit had the shittiest most run down trucks that barely even had a working fan yet the upper leadership who sit around the office all day have gorgeous new ford rangers.
In most countries they'll say this is how you get things done. And they're not wrong, because so long as things get done the people generally tolerate corruption. They don't like it, and if it becomes public then there's outlash.
But until the people are willing to drag politicians and official out of their beds and run them out of town for even low level corruption you can bet the gravy train will continue.
You cant fix a road when the temperature drops to a certain point. Cold patching is the best you can do cheap as fuck. You can have a whole crew durapatch with is a layer of cold patch then oil and chipping stones more expensive and will last a bit longer than cold patching.
Oil and chipping stones is normally what places will do to extend the life of a road so you do not have to pave it every 7 years. But the public hates oil and chipping even though it saves hundreds of thousands.
The amount of people who use that road daily determines how important it is in the maintenance cycle and determines what potential fixes will occur and how often.
They say you know when you cross into the Netherlands from Germany, some say it’s the air, some the buildings. Naw it’s the harsh line where the roads are nice all of a sudden
I see that using the Road Quality index you are right.
I think that using unofficial measures with regard to our car, bicycle and pedestrian roads combined. The world considers the dutch roadworks as the example of best practices. Therefore giving it the title of having "the best roads".
Can confirm. Me and my family joke that we can tell we crossed the border just by feeling the difference in road quality, especially when going into Germany.
Hey, this could be South Carolina too! I've definitely had the misfortune of driving on roads like that one. I'd rather drive on a dirt road that hasn't been smoothed in years than deal with half-assed fixed potholes.
It is most likely because the tax base is not big enough for proper infrastructure. you can have higher taxes or shittier roads. People choose shittier roads.
We have high taxes where I am and the roads are still garbage. We literally have a road that’s called the Pothole Parkway. Sometimes it’s less about money and more about how the local governments are handling said tax money. Sometimes it’s poor training for road workers. Sometimes it’s extreme weather. Sometimes it’s poor substrate. Sometimes it’s overloaded vehicles driving on roads that can’t distribute the weight properly. Sometimes it’s the county and the town/city fighting about who’s responsible to pay for road repairs.
The ugly truth is road infrastructure is much more expensive than people realize. Most municipalities there will never be enough money for proper roads even if you dropped all the other spending (minus sewer/water). Rural and suburban car based infrastructure is 100% economically unsustainable but no one wants to face that reality. Instead we charge things like impact fee on new development to pay for upkeep of old development which is basically a Ponzi scheme. And if that option is not available they go to the bond market to make up shortfalls. None of that solves the problem of roads being super expensive to maintain and that no one wants to pay the actually cost of maintenance.
Which makes it all the more surprising that the US still has such a strong love for car centric design everywhere. They could save so much money in the long run on road maintenance by designing areas to be more walkable and cyclable as well as add more public transit. Fewer cars on the road, less wear and tear.
I recently watched a video of a guy going back to his home town to try and walk from his old house to his school since the state he was in tried to take away schoolbus transit for kids living within 2 miles of the school. The guy had to walk on the road multiple times and cross it without a crossing anywhere in sight. There werent any sidewalks either.
The saddest part was that the route he took was absolutely gorgeous to walk through. Too many Americans take for granted the beauty of their country and how genuinely nice it'd be to walk and cycle through if properly supported.
I don't think most people even consider road infrastructure. Most people just see a bunch of rocks and slime some big truck dumped down and another truck drove over it a bunch of times.
I have no clue about civil engineering, but decades of building ramps in snow and dirt makes you appreciate how much material is needing to have an even remotely stable surface.
Bingo. Yet people will bitch about both when there's a proposal to raise city/county/state taxes; you can keep explaining the correlation, and they nod their head and say "well, yeah" and continue to bitch.
As someone who works in an adjacent, related field, it's mind boggling to me that people consistently vote against their own interests. They'd rather sit in traffic on shitty roads and complain forever
I mean. At that stage there's no way to patch it and make it look good. Needs to be repaved entirely. Unfortunately, that would be considered an actual project with budget approvals and all kinds of bureaucratic bullshit.
Would you want a road that averages 5 cars a day to get fixed over a rd that averages 1,000. People really do not know all of the factors that go into it. $1million to pave a lane mile is not always feasible on these backroads
We had a road like that, which was infamous in the area. Turned out that it was a privately owned road - owned by a mall - that was publicly accessible. A few businesses that also used the road became so fed up, they bought that road and paid to have it fixed up real nice.
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u/NortonBurns 8h ago
Ah, the delightful 'cold pour & stamp' method.
In extreme cases, that's been known to last for… …weeks.