Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements | Hacker News Reader

Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

highways.dot.gov

50 pointstreebrained65 comments

I think they should have included the official NYC procedure, which is:

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.

nobody leaves a dent in the surface on purpose, the problem is that whatever caused the pothole is almost certainly still causing it to sink under the surface. A patch doesn't fix the problem, it just makes it less bad.

Less bad is ok.

Yep. Step 0 in the above list is "build a road with insufficient subsurface/foundation preparation and drainage"

There's a section of town that was developed on an old swampy bit of land. They drained the swamp but did not let the land dry/settle long enough after draining the water. This caused parts of the road to sink, but not enough to break/crack the roads. Instead, they just have swells as you're driving along. It's actually impressive on how much sinking happened without breaking the road itself.

The local obscenely named utility company dug in our road a few years ago, necessitating a large patch. They proceeded to drive through their patch as they left. The tire dents & ridges are still there years later. You're right, of course, but I think you may be overestimating the concern patch crews give to their craft.

That's a method in the manual - "roll-and-go". The fact that it's still there years later is actually proof that the patch was effective, if maybe not well applied.

That's ... How you compact a patch.

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.

Eh, maybe I didn't describe it well. We're talking 1 lane wide, maybe 80 ft long. Dually tire path through the patch. Indented, with the displaced material ridged up along the side, diagonal across the lane. It yanks my motorcycle tire sideways if I hit it, and it's a decent bump in a car. If that's… how you compact it, we need new standards.

Whoa, fancy. All we get are open pits with a few barricades around them until the news finally starts talking about the tree growing in the middle of the road.

Luxury! We used to dream of open pits. All we ever had were craters filled with broken glass and burning petrol. And surrounded by rabid alligators.

Yeah, that's what we used to have but they got a federal grant to improve things.

‘Course where i grew up we had it ‘ard. Aye… We’d get woken up 2 o’clock in the mornin’ after sleeping in a road crater filled with sulphuric acid, race down the street naked in the dead o’ winter to distract the hungry velociraptors while one of us used a dull butter knife to chop off a limb we’d throw into the road hole so the steamroller could come by, flatten it to patch the hole, then use the stump to tamp the edges into place. And drivers these days keep complaining how tough it is to get a pothole fixed…

You should find Seat Safety Switch on tumblr.

My understanding is the DOT gets pissy if locals fill in the pothole themselves, but I imagine that there's enough interested people to do vigilante road repair if they weren't subject to government harrassment.

"Vigilante Road Repair" - cool band name - I call it!

My understanding is the DOT gets pissy if locals fill in the pothole themselves

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/...

Simply paint a penis around the pothole.

Pick it up and drop it on the road outside a local politician's house, there'll be a repair crew there fixing it the next day.

I like Atlanta’s solution even better: after becoming egregious enough sloppily bolt down a much too tall metal plate over the pothole and those that have proliferated nearby. Cross fingers and hope they won’t coalesce as a sink hole and as with everything else: “Go Dawgs”

My wife told me once a pothole on her daily commute through Oakland got big enough that a homeless person took up residence in it.

Or the Parks and Rec procedure, which is "Call Ron Swanson and have some Lagavulin ready".

The root of the problem (literally) is that when potholes appear it's mostly because what's under became too porous and humid so what's over it separates easily. Patching the hole isn't a good fix but the alternative is closing roads which wrecks the economy. The other problem is that the public always asks: "why isn't it patched ?" and if you don't do it you look like you're not competent enough to be in charge. And the cycle continues.

And when you go to your local government, demand a fix, they'll contract a union shop to do the work, often mandated by law, and they will advocate for the least durable, most expensive fix, so as to ensure recurring work happens at a maximum frequency. Attention to certain roads, duration of work is often politicized - someone with good friends gets quick, top tier fixes, but someone who annoys the local council might see months of roadwork dragging on forever, or halfassed repairs, or potholes ignored for years.

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!

It depends entirely on where you live. My city has its own asphalt batch plant and they spend a few weeks every late winter/early spring repairing potholes.

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.

It's awesome when unions serve the function intended. It's not awesome when there's mandatory contracts, 5 men standing around while a 6th holds a bucket, a 7th a shovel, an 8th a painbrush, while the 9th is driving a steamroller, etc. and they use cheap, inappropriate "repairs" that degrade on a predictable rolling 2 year basis. Noble institutions can be as corruptible as governments and private businesses and so forth, all it takes is one person willing to bend, a little, and poof, there's a tidy little predictable sinecure for a decade, with one or more middleman doing the subcontracting out to a union shop, or w/e. Peoples' capacity for grift and graft is endless.

In my beautiful hometown of Philadelphia they have a novel way of repairing potholes that I've yet to observe in other cities:

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!

Philadelphia is blessed by several feet of sub-street layers (stone fill, belgian block, concrete backfill, and terrible asphalt), embedded rail, pipes, and utilities that are all owned and managed by different local, state, and private entities. Oh and fairly wide temperature swings throughout the year, generous precipitation, salt, and let's not forget the drivers themselves. It's a miracle the roads are in as good a shape as they are - but it does have a traffic calming effect :)

You haven't lived until you've paid municipal taxes to see one of these things at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVFFsKArEFk

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.

Yeah, but on the plus side, you're supporting local jobs!

Even in the video it looks like it does a terrible job. Hilariously he drives past all the other potholes that was just shown at the beginning of the video.

I wonder if there are existing data sources that could be used to implement an optimal pot hole patching priority lists at scale.

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.

Reading all of the crabby comments about pothole repair make me feel great about my city in MN. Leave voice mail about pothole on my way to work in morning, pothole filled when I return home in the afternoon.

If nothing is being done about pot holes, consider drawing penises on them: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-32448103

Montreal has joined the chat...

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.

The weather is hell on roads in Minnesota, repeated thaw/freeze cycles really do a number on asphalt pavement. My municipality actually owns and operates an asphalt batch plant, that’s how much time and money is spent on repairing roads here in Saint Paul.

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.

Oakland CA had a pothole vigilante group doing good work several years ago, bless their hearts. Not sure if they're still around, but their DIY approach was commendable and could be replicated. I believe they used "cold patch" asphalt which can be purchased at Home Depot and the like.

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.

Does anyone know what is a post oil industry asphalt strategy? Do we have stockpiles till the end of time already?

Going back to cobblestone roads.

Does anyone expect there will be a post oil industry? I would assume (with not particular knowledge on the subject mind) that once we wind down oil use for fuel and to some extent plastics, there will be enough oil in the ground to support enough extraction for asphalt and other currently trivial uses indefinitely.

An asphalt roofing shingle company just closed in Minneapolis due to the city's new CO2 tax. The local environmental group held a little press conference crowing about it.

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.

> An asphalt roofing shingle company just closed in Minneapolis due to the city's new CO2 tax. The local environmental group held a little press conference crowing about it.

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

Nope, GAF / Building Materials Manufacturing LLC:

https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-business/minneapolis-ro...

I understand that, I was pointing out that another asphalt shingle plant in Minneapolis is still operating despite the CO2 tax.

That's nice, but my response was to demonstrate that there are in fact people who think there's post petroleum industry, or at least desire it, not that none are foolish enough to stick around.

The original tax passed by the council, and overriding the mayor's veto was 90 times the current one at $452 a ton versus the current $5. The only reason for the drop was that the original couldn't possibly survive a challenge in court.

The environmental group celebrating the GAF closure is also real, and would likely celebrate Owens closing too.

Afaik, (extremely simplifying) refineries split crude oil into fractions; we burn lighter hydrocarbons as fuel, make plastics out of the middle/heavy parts and what's left in the pot are some heavy, dirty remains that we figured make good roads instead of being thrown out.

We've already hit the point that electric cars are cheaper to operate, yet photovoltaic prices keep falling. Even equipment like electric excavators is now a thing. Batteries keep improving. It'll compound to smaller and smaller fuel, thus oil needs, so there will be less refining, thus less asphalt.

The assumption wasn't that that there will be no oil extraction, it was that there might be a future without tons of almost free road material. But I have zero expertise in oil macroeconomics, the question might've been stupid, I don't know that, haha

I don't think there will be a post oil industry, at least not as long as we have roads and cars.

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).

Asphalt is actually extremely recyclable. It often gets re-used right were it was torn up.

Traditional oil extraction (drilling a well, not things like the oilsands or fracking) is actually relatively eco-friendly compared to other building products like concrete or steel; the problem is that burning it isn't great for the environment, and the heavy demand due to burning most of it means that lots of it is extracted using the less eco-friendly methods. So I think that the current plan is to continue extracting it more-or-less forever, just in much lower volumes than right now.

As an aside, why do DoT pdfs have such gigantic margins/padding around the text content?

It allows note taking and corrections on drafts.

Same deal with things like SCOTUS opinions. (Random example: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-624_b07d.pdf)

Also allows flexibility in terms of binding options

I’d have thought the 20+ pages before getting to the point would have allowed scrap paper for notes.

Maybe the foreword, acknowledgements, preface and various notes contained something of value.

When you're driving a small car, do you expect the lanes to automatically shrink for you?

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...

I was referring to the notes, notices and various preambles occupying the first quarter of the document.

Which are a very different sort of notes than the ones I'm talking about.

They print it out and people go over it with a pen, make corrections, comments, etc.

To me, I read it as they are stating those pages are really useless fluff that could essentially just be ripped out and used as scratch paper as they seemingly serve no other purpose.

Yes, this.

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.

> Same deal with things like SCOTUS opinions. (Random example: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-624_b07d.pdf)

I don't think that that's quite right. SCOTUS opinions do indeed use a narrow text size (4 1/8" by 7 1/8" [0]), but that's because they're designed to be printed on unusually narrow paper (6 1/8" by 9 1/4" [0]), not to leave room for taking notes. This paper size actually only leaves 1" margins on either side, which leaves less room for taking notes than most other documents.

[0]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/filingandrules/2023RulesoftheCo...

When the SCOTUS justices and staffers are marking up drafts, they’re likely using regular old letter sized paper.

That they can lop those margins off in the final printing that goes in a bound book is just saving a bunch of paper.

Paper industry lobbying?

My guess would be that this was designed to be printed on smaller sheets of paper, like used in paperback novels and similar. But for some reason (possibly to make it more convenient to print on standard paper), the PDF was produced with Letter dimensions.

I don't think that it's for taking notes like the other reply [0] suggests, because if that were the case, I would expect for the cover to take up the whole paper width (since nobody would ever take notes on the cover), and I would expect the margin width to alternate between pages (since it's really hard to write on the inner margin in a bound book).

Using the example given in the other reply [0], the SCOTUS opinions are so narrow because they're printed on a bizarre paper size of 6 1/8" by 9 1/4" [1] [2], not to leave room to take notes.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887595

[1]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/casehand/guidetofilingpaidcases...

[2]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/filingandrules/2023RulesoftheCo...

A manual from the U.S. federal agency uses grams, meters, and Celsius temperatures? How come?

Why fix them, it's free traffic calming.

I did a little (very little, I asked an LLM) what it would cost to produce this report in today's dollars. The answer came in as roughly $90,000–$180,000. Worth it or accurate? I don't know but it is interesting.

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