1. Dig out around the affected area
2. leave massive dent in the surface for what seems like years
3. Maybe cover it with a few janky bits of wood and/or metal sheets that make a hideous clanking noise all day and night and have the same approximate surface friction as an ice rink so are pretty murderous to any 2-wheeled road user
4. Leave this solution to mature like a fine wine
5. I really mean single malt whiskey. You can leave it basically as long as you like
6. There is no step six.
People in Chicago sometimes do this.
It's common enough that WGN Morning News parodied it by having its sports anchor go out and start filling potholes with giardiniera.
https://wgntv.com/video/pat-fills-potholes-with-giardiniera/...
Anyhow, it doesn't matter how much care they put into the job, if the substrate fails the road fails. Simple as that. Patches are temporary fixes.
Lovely little civilization we have, eh?
edit: Huh, must be nice to live in places where that apparently doesn't happen? It's been a comically recurring theme in nearly every city I've lived in - potholes weren't just potholes, they were favors and tools and penalties and grifts. If you've never seen this happen, I'd recommend digging a bit deeper. Very few places have their collective shit together sufficiently to handle the relatively small problems like potholes very well. If your community does, then kudos!
Also, union labor is not mandatory for public work, but the prevailing wage scales that contractors are required to pay their workers do line up pretty closely to the actual union wages. It’s a good thing that people get paid a living wage, in my opinion. There are a lot of facilities that require union labor for certain trades due to the risk involved: mechanical, electrical, and plumbing for the most part.
I've literally watched them approach a pothole full of water, blow the water out with compressed air, retract the blower while the pothole refills, excrete asphalt mix into the watery hole then pat it down and compress it with a roller -- then proceed to the next pothole, driving over and denting the just-"repaired" one.
1. Do nothing for 9 months. This allows the pothole to mature until ready for step 2.
2. Put a traffic cone in the pothole.
3. After a couple weeks of public notice (traffic cone) dump hot asphalt into the hole, making sure to top off several inches above street level.
4. DO NOT WAIT for asphalt to cool down before opening the street. This allows for asphalt to stick to tires, shoes etc.
5. Make sure to leave a significant bump and don't compact the asphalt so next winter it will open up again.
6. Make sure to put any utility covers (manholes, drains etc) directly in the wheel path for maximum damage.
7. Profit!
Identify pot hole locations. Combine with traffic metrics for those locations. Then use a combination of some pot hole nuisance metric (size, depth, location in lane, number of cars that could hit it per unit time based on traffic metrics), a cost to repair for a given repair type metric (should include traffic disruption cost estimates), then have an estimate for future degradation if it is not repaired and the cost of that applied at a few time points .... I'm sure there are plenty of implementations of various versions of the algorithm, but I wonder whether there are open data sources ....
A quick search suggests that most approaches are municipality based crowd sourcing efforts. A stream from the radars from various vehicles could provide something that was up-to-date enough to avoid false positives that had already been fixed .... Things like streetview and various aerial photography datasets probably update too slowly ... though I know of some potholes that have existed through multiple recaptures.
0. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10636488 1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2023.103335
I guess the days of citizens grabbing their shovels and going to fix the roads are becoming a thing of the past. Which is a shame because the total cost of asphalt needed to fix most potholes is less than the cost of a single tire repair.
There is a great documentary on the Quebec situation around potholes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOOgJID6sac
In short: politicians would rather direct funds to build new roads (and get votes) than to fix existing roads (and lose votes).
It is that simple.
It sucks that illegal DIY approaches are necessary, but at some point people just need to take matters into their own hands. It feels like road repair is one of the most visible and perhaps common indicators of local government corruption. My personal favorite is when a perfectly good stretch of road gets repaved to use up tax dollars, while streets in terrible condition get ignored.
https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/public-works/street-maint...
These are just band-aids, the subsurface is usually the problem and it’s expensive to rip up and replace an entire road vs repeated mill and overlay cycles.
We don't really need as much oil for walking paths, trains, or bike trails, and potholes are a different problem with different solutions for those.
As long as we have cars as we know them, we'll have oil. Road construction require s oil, all of the plastics in cars require oil, trucks require oil, shipping vessels require oil, it's oil all the way down.
It would require a seismic shift in life as we know it to live in a post oil world. Our stockpiles are pretty low (maybe a month in the US).
Mind you, this won't change the demand for asphalt shingles, they'll just be shipped from further, generating more C02 on the whole.
The only other current alternatives are all non-renewable as well- mined clay, slate, or metal. For residential roofs, I'm hoping metal continues to come down in price, as they tend to last longer and can be made to look quite good. For commercial / flat roofed buildings, there still needs to be some very thick rubberized underlayment below gravel or whatever to prevent standing water from getting in. The same is true for sod roofs in hobbit style earth homes.
So, yeah, there's still people in power who expect that all petroleum based products are equally evil and must be punished.
For what it’s worth, Owens Corning operates an asphalt shingle plant in North Minneapolis (1701 49th Ave N) and they have no intentions of closing it down.
The commercial roof material you’re referring to is called EPDM rubber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPDM_rubber
Same deal with things like SCOTUS opinions. (Random example: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-624_b07d.pdf)
Maybe the foreword, acknowledgements, preface and various notes contained something of value.
It's a standard so no one has to think "does this page have enough space", and the notes are often relevant to the current page. Stuff like the photo in https://www.thedailybeast.com/photo-details-obamas-speech-ed...
They print it out and people go over it with a pen, make corrections, comments, etc.
But as ceejayoz points out, taking notes on the actual page is better.
I was having a dig at how long it took for the document to get to the point.