How many (pot)holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall?

[mattm04]

Last spring I saw a city DPW truck hit a pot hole and blow a tire. It was fixed about three hours later when I drove by again.

[Racket_Man]

Welcome to my world. Pothole dodging is standard procedure come spring in my area. The freeze-thaw cycle combined with snowplows gives you a lunar surface to drive on.

....

as a delivery driver this is my life during winter spring, summer and fall, my city barely at times does the pave and pray routine with most of its in-town roadways. "Yeah. let's just throw a little gravel or asphalt in that 'hole" and move on".

I hate the winter even more since it tends to bow or buckle the streets/roads that magnify and raise the seams causing my car to feel as if it is on a washboard. I swear that some roads were built like this on purpose.

every spring and fall I have to get my front end aligned because of the crappy roads I travel everyday.

[Salted Grump]

Dare you to drive on Carling Avenue in the middle of winter then.

Whoever made that road decided to use concrete slabs (about 100 feet long, and 50 feet wide, IIRC) with a couple inches of asphalt on top. Within a year the Frostheaves from water seepage through the asphalt caused the entire road surface from Bronson to Richmond (about 7 Kilometres) to buckle like an accordion, and it took nearly 30 years of steady decay before the city finally said 'well, that was a mistake' and actually begin fixing the road.

[BeeMused]

You can buy a pothole here in Germany:

German Town Looking for Pothole Sponsors

It's a steal... only €50 and you can have a plaque on the hole too if you wish so.

[Lace Neil Singer]

Ugh. The main road I travel on to get to work now has four giant potholes; one right bang in the centre of the lane. It has others, but they're not in danger yet being so deep that people fall in them and end up in Wonderland.

[LadyAndreca]

There's a stretch of road about a mile and a half long on the way to school that's AWFUL for potholes. It's so bad that I've started to memorize which way to dodge to avoid most of them (you CAN'T avoid them all) and I'm starting to worry about the shocks in my car from the times I can't avoid them. During the last snow, a gas station actually put a cone in the leading pothole in a series of them in the road in front of their store to warn people that it was there. And it's not a city road--this particular stretch is Highway 71, so it's a state road!

It's kind of funny, seeing the various patches all over it. It was originally a concrete road, and all the oldest patches are real patches (cut out a square of concrete down to the bottom, fill it to the level of the road, essentially creating a small section of brand new road) and in excellent condition. Not a single square patch on the road is damaged. The newer patches are the 'throw asphalt in and pray' types, and are constantly getting ripped out.

[Kogarashi]

It's kind of funny, seeing the various patches all over it. It was originally a concrete road, and all the oldest patches are real patches (cut out a square of concrete down to the bottom, fill it to the level of the road, essentially creating a small section of brand new road) and in excellent condition. Not a single square patch on the road is damaged. The newer patches are the 'throw asphalt in and pray' types, and are constantly getting ripped out.

They recently patched our residential street because of all the cracks and potholes in it. They actually did a proper job, though, using some kind of tar (I think?) instead of just the loose asphalt, so it's also like a mini patch of new road. More shaped to the original pothole, though, so you can still spot where the holes used to be. And it's really amusing down by the one intersection where the cracks were rampant. There's just huge squiggles of the tar stuff all over the road.

I hate the "asphalt and prayers" kind of patches. It never fails, when those are put in, a week or two later you start seeing migrating asphalt debris down the road as the hole starts opening up again.