As inevitable as death and taxes, and about as welcome, is The Bulletin’s Annual Pothole Story, which appeared on this morning’s front page.
Under the headline “What’s with all the potholes in Bend?” the story, accompanied by a neat little graphic, explained how potholes form and why Bend has so many of them.
The reason they form, basically, is that freezing and thawing creates cracks in asphalt and the weight of cars and trucks causes those cracks to extend and deepen until whole chunks of pavement work loose.
The reason there are so many of them in Bend is that (a) Bend has a lot of freezing and thawing and (b) Bend doesn’t have the money or manpower to fix them all.
“Instead of being able to do a lot of [pavement overlay] work, we’re doing pothole patching, temporary repairs, small repairs,” Bend Street Division Manager Hardy Hanson told The Bulletin. “We’ll be doing more and more of this, which is unfortunately a reactive position. We’ll be chasing pothole problems for quite a while.”
Chasing, but never catching up. Hanson explained that the city crews have to practice “triage” in deciding which potholes to fix. ““If we have a truck in the area, we will have the crew monitor it and do what we call ‘throw and go’ — throw some mix in it, compact it and run on. We kind of have to triage because you can’t fix everything really well.”
Of course little potholes that don’t get properly fixed soon grow into big potholes, which the city then has to spend more labor time to repair.
As I see it there are two takeaways from this story:
1. Bend might be able to handle its pothole problem better if it hadn’t allowed so many more miles of road to be built to accommodate development over the last decade without having an adequate revenue source to pay for maintaining them.
2. People who like to bitch about the cost of Bend Area Transit and other forms of “subsidized public transit” should consider that the Bend budget for the current biennium includes $200,000 just to fix potholes and more than $13.4 million total for street maintenance – compared to $5.7 million for BAT and Dial-a-Ride.
Think car travel isn’t “subsidized”? Think again.
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2010.
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Good explanation. Just wondering how the dollars figure out for per person. Spend 5.7 mill on a couple dozen riding the bus, vs. the thousands and thousands driving.
where do you get your figures that ‘couple dozen’ use the bus and dial-a-ride combined? huh? where? you should consider working for fox news since youre willing to post an offhand comment like that as fact for the world to read. life is much simpler without facts.
Studs need to be made illegal (allowing exceptions for rear wheel drive cars). I think they are more to blame than development. I lived in Finland for two years and never came across studs…or potholes for that matter (and no, not all their streets are cobblestone).
Walt: Yes, you could look at it that way. My point was just that everybody kvetches about public transit being subsidized apparently without realizing that car travel is heavily subsidized.
Also, the $13.4 million is only for street maintenance — it doesn’t count the cost of road construction, police patrols or EMTs to rescue the victims of accidents on the roads.
And finally, I’m sure there are more than “dozens” of people using BAT and Dial-a-Ride.
Robinson: I think studs may be part of the problem but not the whole problem. The roads back East are potholed much worse than ours and studded tires aren’t used there. Maybe Finland is just better at fixing potholes.
Washington state did an exhaustive study a couple of years ago. There is a serious impact from studded tires–quantifying it on asphalt is difficult.
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/biz/mats/pavement/PavementsStuddedTiresFinalv2.pdf
I have lived in snow country all but ten of my 60 years. Twenty of them have been in mountainous snow country and no–Bend is not ‘mountainous.’ I have owned and driven rear drive, front drive, and all wheel drive vehicles–never with studded tires.
Okay–now I’m sounding like a crusty old CO fart who ‘knows what he knows’, but speed and a lack of experience are the reason people have accidents. And there are some days when driving is just plain wrong. Talk to someone who owns a body shop–almost every vehicle they repair in the winter has studs around here.
Drive slowly and with extreme care when the conditions warrant.
And get rid of studs. They just delay the Darwin effect.
Stephen: Good post. I’ve used studless winter tires on my vehicle for the past three winters and I get around just fine. The vehicle has AWD and ABS, but I think front-wheel drive would work almost as well.
For many people, I think, studs give an illusion of safety that encourages them to drive faster and less carefully than they otherwise would — thus, ironically, making them LESS safe. Driving a big SUV adds to the illusion of invulnerability, as well as increasing the risk of a rollover because of the higher center of gravity.
Bend has nothing on Spokane as the pothole capital of the country. The streets in Spokane are like a minefield.
Robinson writes that he “lived in Finland for two years and never came across studs…”
I can’t speak for the facts in Finland because I didn’t bother to do a search on Finland, but it’s worth noting that snow tires are required by law in winter in Sweden, and that more than two-thirds of drivers there employ studs. Neither situation, of course, is especially relevant, because central Oregon winters are so much milder than those in Scandinavia.
We have siped traction tires on one rig and studded snow tires on another — and the better-performing vehicle alternates frequently between December and March.