Owing perhaps to a certain mentality that says “fix it now,” several American cities are approaching pothole repair in the spring of 2013 as a special event. Maybe it’s just another version of spring cleaning. Or, perhaps it is due to the fact that the mild winter of 2011-2012 allowed some reprieve with the return of harsher snow, rain and freeze-thaw cycle conditions in the 2012-2013 season.

Chicago, Washington D.C., Oakland (California) and Colorado Springsall decided to name their efforts at fixing bad pavement with the suffix “–palooza.” The Chicago Department of Transportation declared the weekend of April 5 its three-day festival for citizen reporting on the asphalt craters as “Potholepalooza,” asking motorists and other citizens to text, phone (3-1-1), click on the city website or use the SeeClickFix or ChicagoWorks phone apps. Following that, city crews went about the job of pothole repairs. Already 116,000 potholes had been repaired in the previous month. Potholepalooza Chicago-style involved at least 20,000 repaired potholes in the first week of April alone.

Washington, D.C. has claimed the “Potholepalooza” title since 2009, with its focus also on responding to citizen requests in a concentrated period of time. The nation’s capital might be a center for disagreement and dissent, but the District Department of Transportation managed to address 21,000 such road divots and cracks in April, responding in just 48 hours instead of the usual promise to address them in 72 hours.

Not to be outdone, Oakland, California’s pothole problems gets their own version of a “pothole palooza,” according to the Silicon Valley MercuryNews.com, when between April 29 and June 6 the city will be particularly attentive to citizen reporting on pavement problems. The news site’s columnist recruits participation among readers, saying “we don’t want [late night host David] Letterman telling fans they can ride a burro to the bottom of our potholes.”

Colorado Springs’s pothole palooza was a six-week affair, also centered around the idea of citizen reporting. “There’s a massive amount of roadway,” said a city spokesperson, because “we can’t be everywhere.” The city has a crew of 94 people who work on street maintenance, which included 28,821 potholes in 2012. The earlier winter months of 2013 were mild, but a combination of the city’s aging street system and more moisture in March seems to have pushed up the degree of road deterioration for this year nonetheless.

The Missouri Department of Transportation uses the descriptive “Missouri Pothole Patrol” in Aprilto trumpet its fast attention to pavement cracks, bulges and crevices. As in Chicago and D.C., the emphasis is on citizen reporting: “We need the public’s help to spot these potholes and let us know where they are,” says Elizabeth Wright, the state maintenance engineer with MoDOT. “We want to encourage our customers to contact us any time they see something of concern.”

LongIsland.com reports that severe storms – Hurricane Sandy and Winter Storm Nemo – are responsible for a “dramatic rise in the number and severity of potholes on our roadways,” says the website’s reporter. One person interviewed in Smithtown, New York said the potholes plaguing their neighborhood “are more than just an inconvenience – they’re a potentially lethal hazard to motorcyclists and motorists alike.” Others interviewed on Long Island used colorful terms to describe conditions: “the ‘WORST’ road,” “potholes big enough to fit an entire tire…the road should be condemned and shut down,” certain roads look “like they were testing dynamite on them” and “it’s like a third-world country…like driving down a bombed-out road.”

Town by town, the problems on Long Island are being addressed: Babylon, New York had a pothole blitz in March, while Islip purchased an asphalt crusher for pavement recycling. Smithtown approved a measure to fund pothole repairs and road improvements in 2013 with $8 million.

To the south of the Island and with much known damage from Hurricane Sandy, SILive.com provides updates on potholes for Staten Island via a mysterious character known as “Pothole Patty.” Appearing only as an inert garden gnome, Pothole Patty writes reports on storm recovery to the borough, which is ongoing and incomplete as of April.

Meanwhile, up the east coast in Amherst, Massachusetts, the Department of Public Works reports a relatively small number of potholes (about 1,000) waiting for their pothole doctors. A spokesman for the DPW says the unseasonably harsh spring weather has delayed their ability to complete repairs.

While the freeze-thaw cycles that make late winter the most damaging times for roadways – as the weather fluctuates between winter and spring and temperatures sometimescross the 32-degrees F (0 degrees C) several times within a day – there still are plenty of potholes found in semi-tropical and tropical locations as well. This because moisture alone can lead to pavement deterioration, as does the wear and tear of traffic and the aging of roads. Heat too leads to potholes.

But the City of Edmonton Roadway Maintenance Director, Bob Dunford, told the Edmonton CTV News that 2013 was extraordinary. “We never broke the 600,000 mark. We hit about 594,000 back in 2007, I think we’ll break that this year,” he said.

Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel told another news station (CBC News) in March that 2013 would need $12 million in the city budget to repair the potholes. “If you look at this winter – we’ve had freezing and thawing, freezing and thawing way more than any other year,” he said, adding “and we have had a little more snow than normal. It creates havoc. It’s a fact of life in our city.” The city council approved the extra $12 million budget in late March. Work on the potholes has been so taxing that spring street sweeping is off schedule by several weeks.

Despite a northern, plains location (53-degrees north, 113-degrees west), Edmonton has milder winters than geographically comparable Regina and Winnipeg to the south. Average daily low temperatures are 10.9 degrees F (-11.7 degrees C) and 63.5 degrees F (17.5 degrees C) in July. It is also fairly dry, with only an annual 18.8 inches (476.9 millimeters) of precipitation in rain and snow melt. Moisture is a major contributor to pavement deterioration, with and without freeze-thaw cycles.

The Edmonton city streets are largely on a grid system, as well as “off-grid” Yellowhead Trail (highway 16) Anthony Henday Drive and Whitemud Drive. The Yellowhead Highway is the main connection to Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. To the south, travelers take the Queen Elizabeth II Highway to reach Calgary and Fort Macleod.

But in Yekaterinburg, Russia one of the oldest means of communication was put into play in 2012 when an ad agency was hired to take a different tack to highlight some infrastructure problems. With a few skilled strokes of an artist’s paintbrush, the complaints about poor street quality were made eminently photo-worthy. Deep potholes were turned into gaping mouths of the local city manager, the mayor and the provincial governor, whose faces framed the broken pavement.

The implication was obvious – all talk but no fixed pavement – and it worked. Within 24 hours, the mayor’s office issued a statement saying the “unsanctioned and inappropriate pictures that were polluting the city” had to be removed. Wisely, those host potholes were repaired by the city in the process.

The ad agency didn’t limit the view of these caricatures to mere passersby. Posted on the blog URA.RU, which sponsored the campaign, as well as social media sites including Twitter, Vkontakte and LiveJournal, were photos that can still be accessed. While art and potholes can be erased rather quickly on terra firma when found to be a politically challenging, bothmight live long in cyberspace.

In 2013, New York artist Davide Luciano turned his own frustrations into a comical series of staged photos centered on potholes. The potholes in his photo series include a beach lifeguard responding to a hand rising out of an apparently-deep pothole, another features a diner consuming spaghetti and meatballs from a pothole, while others depict a woman doing laundry, a man crushing grapes with his feet, champagne on ice, a gardener planting flowers and a fisherman hooking a big catch – all from deep chuckholes in New York City.

It began with outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the former Republican congressman from Illinois serving in the Obama administration since 2009. In a February 6 interview with Diane Rehm, the syndicated National Public Radio host (based out of WAMU radio in Washington, DC), LaHood spoke about his concerns regarding infrastructure funding by the Congress – or to be more accurate, the lack thereof.

“America is one big pothole right now,” said LaHood. He cited the two-year, $105 billion surface transportation bill passed by Congress in 2012, which he believes should have been larger and sufficient to fund projects over the next five years. “It was only a two-year bill because they couldn’t find enough money to fund a five-year bill.” Congress historically has funded transportation and infrastructure every half decade.

“At one time…we were the leader in infrastructure,” LaHood said. “We built the interstate system. It’s the best road system in the world, and we’re proud of it. But we’re falling way behind other countries because we have not made the investments.”

On February 12, in his annual State of the Union address, President Obama also spoke of the need to shore up crumbling infrastructure as an economic stimulus. He cited in the annual joint session of Congress that CEOs of most companies typically prefer to locate their companies where the roads and Internet connections are working smoothly and at high speed. To that point, he proposed a “Fix-It-First” program, which would put people to work on such things as the nation’s 70,000 bridges found to be deficient, in addition to port, pipeline and school refurbishments.

While the president proposed a mix of public and private investments to fund such repairs, at least one transportation advocate puts the onus on politicians. “Every day millions of frustrated Americans lose valuable time and money waiting in traffic,” said Robert Darbelnet, president of the AAA Auto Club. “They are relying on their elected officials to provide relief.”

The day following the President’s speech, February 13, the new House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman, Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), indicated he may be prioritizing this and is searching for bipartisan solutions. In addition to hearing from former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, testimony was provided by both a business and a union leader. They laid forth several key observations on infrastructure, which were published in the Washington Post:

• Infrastructure fixes will be expensive.
• The federal gas tax needs to be raised, but even if it is, other funding sources will be necessary (read more here and here about how the gas tax system works – and why newer vehicles’ improved gas efficiency is adversely affecting this revenue source).
• States should be allowed to collect tolls on federal interstate highways.
• Eventually, a per-miles-driven tax will be necessary to match road usage to road repairs.

The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is on board with this. “The one thing we can’t do is neglect the problem,” said Thomas J. Donohue to the Post. “”It will not get any better if we just sit here and look at it. We’ve got to raise more money.” That cost might be as high as $2.7 trillion, according to studies on transportation and infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Donohue believes that the focus should be less on costs and more on benefits if they want voters to support various funding measures. Rendell concurs, arguing that when motorists understand their fuel costs (from idling in traffic) are greater than user fees that can fix it, allocating appropriate funds will be more likely.

“We have to figure out how to legislate common sense,” says Shuster. “I don’t know how to do that.”

If common sense doesn’t work, perhaps humor might. Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, used his characteristic tongue-in-cheek apoplexy to criticize Obama’s speech, suggesting that infrastructure funding should have been the headline of the night. “70,000 [bridges] structurally deficient!,” he said. “I mean, come on! Shouldn’t you have opened with that?!”

It may all be talk – and jokes – at this point. But with bipartisan support and a strong business impetus to improve roads and bridges, maybe now things can move to the action stage.

The images from Hurricane Sandy’s wrath in northeastern U.S. states include many of streets inundated with water as well as beachfront highways completely destroyed by storm surges. The loss of life, with nearly 100 storm-related deaths reported and the full tally not yet known (as of 11/2/12), as well as human suffering amongst family and communities where entire neighborhoods were destroyed, is of course of utmost concern. But in the clean up, we can expect to see many streets, roads and highways that are rendered unpassable and consequently will need to be rebuilt.

Within the days following the hurricane, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced it is releasing $29 million in emergency funds to repair roads. This money is divided according to assessed need per state: New York and New Jersey receive the largest amounts, $10 million each, while $4 million goes to North Carolina, $3 million to Rhode Island, and $2 million to Connecticut.

“These emergency relief funds represent only the start of our commitment to the region’s recovery,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “We need to do all we can to help communities get their transportation systems up and running.”

Reports from the local media in affected areas provides a closer look at where some of these dollars will be needed most:

Long Beach Island, New Jersey – The Star-Ledger’s nj.com surveyed destruction in this vacation destination, noting “some roads in waist-high sand after the storm surge completely pushed over the barrier island to the bay side. Hundreds of beach houses there are designed to allow the first floor to break away in such a surge, which left the top half of those houses still standing on stilts. Bulldozers have been recruited to clear the sand from those highways and streets.

Rodanthe, North Carolina – The Charlotte News-Observer ran dramatic photos of North Carolina Highway 12 (NC-12), a state highway and popular tourist route that traverses the shoreline of the northeastern part of the state, which show the asphalt road practically slipping into the sea. Large, long cracks suggest the sandy foundation of the road was undermined by strong storm surges.

New York State – EmpireStateNews.net reports that state comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli is projecting a net cost of $18 billion to rebuilding New York State infrastructure, including highways, power, water and sewer systems. DiNapoli bases these numbers on previous natural disasters and cautions this may be an underestimation. The news website adds, “Rapid remediation would reduce damage from the corrosive effects of water, pollutants and other factors,” to which DiNapoli responds, “The sooner we get contractors on the ground to assist residents and business owners, the faster New York will be back on its feet.”

The presence of so much moisture just before winter weather sets in suggests additional problems for pavement quality. Water, asphalt cracks and freeze-thaw cycles generally result in potholes and other forms of road deterioration. This might be exaggerated where the subsoil has shifted due to extreme flooding. Coastal areas, for obvious reasons, are likely to be the most affected.

The $29 million in federal funds are not likely to be the total. The New York Times reports that the federal government ultimately paid out $120 billion in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 for all emergency and long-term losses and infrastructure repairs.

That’s because scorching summertime temperatures in the 90s and 100s (Fahrenheit – in Celsius that’s about 32 to 38 degrees C and higher) have come early to each of these regions. Already by mid-June, municipalities from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania began dealing with sudden roadway eruptions, caused when the expansion of concrete pavement under extreme temperatures forces sections to buckle. When the first heavy vehicle rolls over those buckles, the pavement crumbles and you get the summer version of a pothole. Asphalt pavement offers a different phenomenon, that of trapped water in sublayers under pavement. Under extreme heat conditions, trapped moisture that cooks under the roadway can literally explode – quite like steam blowing the lid off a pressure cooker.

One of the first example of heat-induced potholes is from north of the border, in Toronto. The temperatures cracked 34C (that’s 93F) already on June 21, the highest such reading on that date in 60 years. To Texans who endured 40 straight days of 100-degreeF (38C) and higher temperatures in the summer of 2011, that may seem like a reprieve. But when your ‘Leafs are only a few weeks off the ice, it’s pretty tough on the people and their cars. The Toronto Star reported that two lanes on the 401 at Avenue Road were closed that afternoon when a 30-centimeter (11 inches) section had buckled up. It took the Ministry of Transportation two hours to “grind down the heaved highway,” according to the paper.

But most of the action is happening south, where the heat wave is currently concentrated. Here is a roundup of reports in the Midwest and East:

Iowa – The state Department of Transportation issued a warning published in the Quad City Times back in July 2011, explaining that a combination of wet weather alternating with heat are the combination that leads to asphalt blow ups. This year, the Spencer Daily Reporter in Clay County, Iowa reported exploding asphalt already in mid-June.

Michigan – The problems with heat affected some very serious and experienced drivers at the Michigan International Speedway. The Toledo Blade interviewed Dale Earnhardt, Jr. who shared sentiments with other NASCAR drivers in the Quicken Loans 400 on June 17. The racing organization required tire changes at mid-race, which drivers resisted although it did allow them to assess the shape of their tire tread. They found blistering, due to both road temperatures and new pavement, which enabled faster speeds. Earnhardt told Speed Channel TV his tires felt “like they were six years old. This ain’t cool.”

Missouri – The CBS-TV affiliate in St. Louis reported that a MoDOT (Missouri Department of Transportation) maintenance engineer says it’s difficult to predict where pavement blowups will happen in advance. The news show cites such road deterioration events as a “dangerous problem.”

Oklahoma – In Romona, a small town in Washington County in the northeast corner of the state, concrete was reported to be buckling on June 26. According to KJRH-TV, damage to sections of US 75 required several days of repair work. The state DOT spokesperson explained, “concrete moves and expands. This area near Romona happened at a joint.” A lot was learned in the heat waves of 2011, the reporter explained.

Pennsylvania – A PennDOT spokesperson told the Montgomery County Times-Herald that portions of Route 422 buckled on June 20, forcing emergency repairs and lane closures. He explained these pavement breakdowns are “not terribly unusual on older concrete beds where you have days of 90-degree temps.”

Wisconsin – The Fox-TV affiliate in Wausau reports that “authorities across central Wisconsin are receiving reports about pavement buckling on roads and highways due to high temperatures.” In one case, both US 10 westbound lanes in Portage County were closed for repairs on June 9. Local roads in Marathon County were also affected by pavement buckling and required repair work.

So how will the temperatures – and roads – fare as the summer wears on? The Weather Channel says “Get ready for a hot summer from the Desert Southwest into the nation’s heartland.” In June-August 2012, we should expect “the most above-average warmth to focus from the nation’s CornBelt to the southern Rockies and Desert Southwest. Above-average warmth is also expected into the Great Lakes and Northeast.” The Southeast (including Florida) and the West Coast should expect cooler than average summer weather.

That may be good news for motorists in Alabama, Florida and Georgia. But for those who live in heat-affected regions, buckle-up: Buckling concrete and exploding asphalt may be in store.

In Chicago, adherents to the Chicago Plan of 1909 (which was drawn by up by the venerated Daniel Burnham, a design described as “the most influential document in the history of urban planning”), more than 1,400 miles of alleys provide utility access and places for garages for city residents as well as businesses, large and small. By contrast, Manhattan (New York City) has almost no alleys. The difference is most visible in how Chicagoans have their garbage picked up from the alleys, while tony New Yorkers find themselves sidestepping garbage (and garbage smells) that is placed at the curb, at the front doors of multimillion-dollar town homes.

In Europe, alleys in older parts of cities follow centuries-old footpaths, most of them too narrow to handle vehicular traffic. In the old quarters of Barcelona, Paris, London, Rome and Vienna, alleys are filled with restaurants, boutiques and service providers – often, a fashionable place to promenade. In the trendy Le Marais quarter of Paris, distinguishing between streets and alleys is sometimes hard to do. It’s in the alleys where the most fashionable businesses are and where their stylish patrons gather.

Chicago’s permeable alley pavement experiment

Back in Chicago, the alleys are viewed as both a problem and a solution. The pavement is deteriorated in many areas (see photos), in part due to irregular maintenance and to frequent utility cuts. Many are still paved with bricks, an indication of how infrequently alleys are resurfaced.

But the larger problem is overall hard surfaces in Chicago and many other urban areas in America. In heavy rains, water is not absorbed naturally into the earth but instead runs off roofs, parking lots, roads and alleys into the storm sewer system. In low-lying areas, the water load is so great that streets, viaducts and basements flood in a matter of minutes. A multi-billion dollar “Deep Tunnel Project,” which is about half complete, is intended to channel these rainwater floods to a series of reservoirs. However, it will not be complete until 2029, and even then skeptics suggest it will never be able to handle all the water all the time. In the meantime, this watershed is mixed with raw sewage which empties into Lake Michigan after storms and befouls the cities beachs with high bacteria counts. This can happen a dozen or more times per summer, disappointing beachgoers for days at a time.

To mitigate the stormwater loads, Chicago is experimenting with permeable pavement in what it calls the “Green Alleys Program.” Permeable pavement comes in many forms, some of which can look like traditional asphalt (or, paving blocks and grids); all feature holes with a porous underlayment that allows water absorption. In a current test in the city, only a depressed center of some alleys is permeable while the remainder is traditional asphalt. The rainwater channels to the permeable section, preventing it from flushing out to the street and into a storm system drain. Much of the city nearest Lake Michigan is underlain with sandy soils, which further helps with this soaking up of rainwater – once the hard surface above it allows water to percolate down.

Seattle works to create Paris-style alleys

Architecture writer Mark Hinshaw, in Crosscut.com, talks about a hoped-for conversion of alleys in Seattle from “havens of antisocial and criminal behavior … lined with trash bins and truck-loading docks.” He cites an existing section that fits his ideal called Post Alley, connected to the recognized Pike Market district, where “vegetable stands, fishmongers, bakeries, coffee bars, French and Italian cafes, an Irish pub and diminutive specialty shops” now thrive. He wants to extend the commercial use of that alley, where the presence of back-building fire escapes remind him of New York’s Little Italy.

Seattle’s Department of Transportation is working with the International Sustainability Institute (ISI, also based in the “Emerald City”) to develop ideas for converting another alley, Nord Alley off Pioneer Square, into some type of public, “lively, outdoor room,” as Hinshaw describes it. Seattle DOT and the ISI sponsored a competition in 2010 for designers to offer up plans for making that happen. The ideas incorporated guidebooks and phone apps to help visitors understand the significance of points of interest in the alleys, and one took a more ambitious course in upgrading paving, lightning, trash/recycling containment and storm water infiltration. All agree that businesses to attract foot traffic will complete the picture.

ISI studied pedestrian traffic in Seattle’s downtown and found that about 75 percent of people there are willing to walk nine or more blocks. The Institute itself fronts on an alley that “people would use as a bathroom,” says founder Todd Vogel. But by installing window planters, a hanging art installation made of recycled water bottles and adding second hand patio furniture, he thinks that alley is on its way up. “We started respecting the space and people started to respect it.”

Hinshaw also wrote that giving alleys names might be a way to render them more important. He sees character in alleys, particularly where they are in close proximity to the city’s cultural history. While much of the city grid is numbered (145^th Street, for example), which he decries for lacking in poetry and imagination, the naming of alleys can create a stronger sense of history and character for neighborhoods. A few alleys are now named are for poets and writers, which he seems to like, and he suggests that reviving names from the indigenous people who preceding European settlers would be appropriate and educational as well.

Hinshaw’s main point about alleys is that instead of treating them as places to hide, for utility and garbage, these points of egress can be much more functional and attractive.

In a future for cities like Seattle and Chicago, there could be less talk about “back alleys” and more about those interesting places that play an important role in the local retail business culture and environment.

That is closing line on New York Post columnist Cindy Adams’ usual run down of the weird and famous of the Big Apple. But we might say the same of the NYC Department of Transportation’s clever method for communicating the relentless enterprise of pothole repair. The department sponsors a website called The Daily Pothole, which does what you might expect: it provides a tally of the number of potholes filled every day.

And filled at night, we should add. The NYC DOT website stresses that much of their planned work takes place during the dark. It is the city that never sleeps, after all. But it also is less disruptive to the throngs of traffic in all five boroughs that is thick in all but the wee hours of the night.

But does this meet Ms. Adam’s standards for weird and famous? Well, some might consider a website that reports on what are basically pavement voids to be weird (but looked at another way, repairing potholes ultimately leads to a smoother ride, fewer accidents and less money spent on car repairs). Famous is a given: everyone knows what a pothole is. We know them the minute we see them.

And those potholes, repaired and not yet repaired, are all over the place in New York. The run down at last check (on March 23, 2012) was as follows:

1,085 potholes repaired on March 22, 2012

1,329 potholes repaired on March 21, 2012

1,886 potholes repaired on March 20, 2012

1,240 potholes repaired on March 19, 2012

1,052 potholes repaired on March 15, 2012

1,488 potholes repaired on March 13, 2012

1,508 potholes repaired on March 12, 2012

1,878 potholes repaired on March 8, 2012

The site also tallies totals since it was put up: 187,272. But just as important, The Daily Pothole links to the city’s online pothole reporting form as well as a street rating map.

You can call it weird or famous, but most important you can check in on progress and create some progress of your own by reporting a pothole that needs to be repaired. Clearly, the city of New York DOT is on the case.

According to conditions reported in The Wall Street Journal in 2010, the price of petroleum has a lot to do with it. Asphalt is made with aggregate mixed with oil byproducts. With the soaring price of crude, the cost of maintaining and rebuilding asphalt roads has become economically prohibitive to many counties and townships. After they are no longer able repair multiplying potholes that naturally result with age, traffic and seasonal freeze-thaw oscillations, the only affordable option is to convert asphalt roadways into what was there decades ago, crushed stone.

“A lot of these roads have just deteriorated to the point that they have no other choice than to turn them back to gravel,” said Larry Galehouse, director of the National Center for Pavement Preservation at Michigan State University, to the Journal. “We’re leaving an awful legacy for future generations.”

This is happening in widespread sections of the country, from California to Michigan, Iowa and South Dakota.

In Washington County, Iowa, the county engineer told the National Association of Counties’ County News, “Our ability to maintain our roads has diminished, particularly over the last 10 to 20 years as we’ve experienced cost increases and funding shortfalls.”

In Sonoma County, which is part of California’s venerated wine producing region (adjacent to Napa, Mendocino and Lake counties), the board of supervisors looked at a $55 million estimate for county road networks against its $5 million budget. Of nearly 1400 miles of roads in the county, only 11 percent (about 150 miles) are now deemed a priority.

While decisions about what will happen to lower-priority roads have yet to be made, the county’s transportation and public works director told County News, “at some point, the roads not on a priority system…will be just too costly to provide those safety improvements. At that time we’re probably going to pulverize them and turn them into gravel.”

People who use the lower-priority gravel roads – rural residents and farmers, primarily –are none too pleased. When Brown County, South Dakota converted one road to gravel, residents immediately complained. Counties are quickly learning to handle public relations matters when these pavement-to-gravel conversions take place.

In Indiana, the Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) out of Purdue University conducts seminars titled “Back to the Stone Age,” which counsels counties on de-paving roads. “There are some public relations issues that go along with unpaved versus paved roads,” said John Habermann, head of the program. “There would be some dust considerations to deal with,” he told County News. “Landowners who have grown accustomed to pavement now living on a gravel road may expect some dust controls to go along with that.”

Expensive oil, declining gas tax revenues to blame

The economics of road maintenance is a vicious circle. Petroleum is an essential component of asphalt, and since the July 2010 report about roads going gravel in The Wall Street Journal the price per barrel of crude oil has risen from about $76 to $102, an approximately 34 percent increase.

Compounding matters is where the money comes from to pay for fixing potholes and other pavement deterioration. While gasoline taxes have traditionally funded road maintenance it is an amount pegged per gallon of consumption, not price (an amount that varies by state and county, as detailed in this Pothole.info article). The current recession has meant overall traffic has declined over the past few years. Add to that how increased fuel efficiency means fewer gallons of gasoline is purchased overall. That foretells a grim longer-term future for highway maintenance revenues overall.

Bottom line: Funding for road repair has diminished even as costs have risen.

The U.S. Federal Highway Administration maintains a guidebook for gravel road upkeep (“Gravel Roads Maintenance and Design Manual”) that claims eight inches of gravel can be installed at an expense that is equivalent to putting in a single inch of asphalt. But the maintenance costs do not end with installation – not if you want to keep the gravel roads operable. Every mile of a gravel road in Michigan, for example, costs about $2,600 per year to maintain (reconstruction of the same road would cost $75,000 per mile). In Iowa, Allamakee County’s roads engineer claims that per-mile costs for conversion to gravel are around $5,000 per mile where resurfacing could cost as much as $100,000. Conversions require special equipment as well: one type of equipment used for the gravel conversion, a Caterpillar RM300 rotary mixer, costs $400,000.

“This is a step backwards”

No one is particularly happy with this phenomenon. According to an April 2011 story about it in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “the paved roads that finally brought rural American in to the 20^th century are starting to disappear across the Midwest in the 21^st…country residents driving cars and pickup trucks hate the gravel for its slushy texture in spring, the dust in summer and the washboard-like ridges that sometimes emerge.”

The paper notes that the Minnesota state legislature raised the state’s gas tax by 8.5 cents per gallon in 2008, which has helped stave off asphalt-to-gravel conversions in many places. Residents and elected officials there see what’s happening with gravel in neighboring states and are willing to pay more into public coffers to prevent it.

“We definitely miss the hard surface [roads],” a resident of Lansing, Iowa told the newspaper reporter from the Twin Cities. But that particular resident’s husband was more philosophical about it. Gravel did, he notes, replace a potholed streetscape with stones. “I’d rather have concrete, but it’s just so expensive. And really, why should everybody in the rest of the county help pay for my hard surface road?”

At first glance, this seems to be a proposal to place greater strains on roads and bridges, further damaging our already crumbling infrastructure. The breakdown of roads and bridges is a function of several different things – freeze-thaw cycles, moisture, high temperatures, time and wear and tear, the worst of which is heavy vehicles. But supporters of the bill claim its provisions would not cause new damage to infrastructure, and would additionally alleviate traffic congestion and possibly reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

The provisions of the Act have been incorporated into the broader American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act by the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure as of January 31, 2012. Congressman John Mica (R-FL), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, posted his rational for pushing this bill on The Hill’s Energy and Environment blog on March 20, 2012.

The Coalition for Transportation Productivity (CTP), a group lobbying in support of this legislation, notes that heavier vehicles under provisions of the Act would have an additional sixth axel, which spreads the weight out over four more tires. Under current rules, five axels and 18 tires carrying 80,000 pounds means about 4444 pounds per tire. With six axels and 22 tires, 97,000 pounds places 4409 pounds per tire on roads – a slight reduction of pressure on pavement at the moment of tire-to-asphalt contact.

Trucks cause more damage to infrastructure than cars

Note that the trucks will not increase in size. The increase is in how much freight weight can be contained within single-trailer vehicles. But that still strikes us as a dynamic, something different. Would the additional 17,000 pounds lead to pavement deterioration any faster than with the current standard of lighter trucks?

A report, “Effect of Truck Weight on Bridge Network Costs – Report 495,” published in 2003 by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP, by Gongkang Fu, in cooperation with the National Research Council, Transportation Research Board, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, and the U.S. Federal Highway Administration) suggests some concerns are well placed.

The report looks at a study begun in 1982 on two bridges in relatively close proximity in the Bay Area of northern California. One bridge carries I-880 and allows trucks of all legal weights (up to 80,000 pounds), and the second bridge (I-580) runs parallel but only allows vehicles with gross vehicle weight (GVW) at or below five tons (10,000 pounds), which limits it to much lighter trucks and automobiles). These bridges provide good points of comparison because they are built with the same design and engineering, environmental conditions for both are the same and no deicing agents are used on either because the area almost never has freezing temperatures. This isolates the single biggest factor that would lead to pavement deterioration on the two spans, which is traffic.

Despite the fact the I-880 bridge deck is about 15 percent thicker – 7.5 inches vs. 6.5 inches – the bridge carrying heavier vehicles clearly and repeatedly required a significantly larger number of repairs over the decades the two were studied. “It is concluded that the difference in the two decks’ condition was due to the different truck loads carried … these two routes have had similar total annual average daily traffic (AADT) over these years, but very much different truck traffic.”

From this we can broadly conclude that vehicle weight – not frequency of traffic – has a deleterious effect on pavement. This does not definitively say, however, that a difference between 80,000 pounds and 97,000 pounds will noticeably matter. But the more weight = more potholes equation seems logical. But in an advocacy packet published by the CTP, research on how the bill would affect Interstate and non-Interstate roads in the state of Wisconsin, taxpayers would save between $1.1 million and $10.19 million in pavement expenses if vehicle miles traveled were reduced by way of six-axel, 97,000 pound vehicles.

Benefits of bigger trucks include additional user fee

But truck traffic is inevitable in a commercial system that has migrated freight from rail to surface transportation over the past several decades, as previously reported on Pothole.info.

Which is the basis for an argument in support of this bill. Proponents state that the advantages include fewer vehicles on the road, increased highway safety, an overall boost to the economy and even environmental benefits. Here is how that would work:

• Fewer vehicles means less congestion – The coalition supporting this bill says heavier freight-filled trucks “will simply allow an individual company to use fewer trucks to deliver a given amount of products. Enabling our manufacturers, growers and producers to be more efficient is the best way to ensure our prosperity in the years ahead.”

• Improved highway safety – CTP also bases its argument for safety on the idea that there will be fewer trucks on the road, or, more specifically fewer truck vehicle miles traveled. In other words, fewer trucks traveling fewer miles should translate to fewer accidents. The coalition cites member MillerCoors, which could reduce its fleet by 2,000 trucks and log one million fewer vehicle miles per week.

One opposition group, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety (AHAS), which enumerates an average of 4,676 deaths per year in truck-involved crashes, argues that heavier vehicles are more deadly. An argument is sometimes made that, given the basic principles of physics, braking distances would be longer with 97,000-pound trucks. The CTP, however, cites research that shows the stopping distance for a five-axel 80,000-pound vehicle is 240 feet, while a six-axel vehicle weighing 97,000 pounds would require 241 feet.

But AHAS points out that total vehicle miles traveled will likely increase over time, as happened since the 1980s when freight weights were increased from 73,000 pounds per vehicle. Their argument may hold water, but for a slightly different reason: Because population increases generally lead to freight increases, therefore overall freight will be greater in the future. Add to that how heavier vehicles will enable truck shipping to be economically advantaged over rail, therefore the total number of vehicles using the roads still would likely increase for two reasons – population increase and shipping economics – in the long run.

• A boost to the economy, benefits to consumers and businesses – This idea works off the general concept of shipping efficiency. Currently, many trucks travel great distances with partially empty vehicles due to weight limitations. With fuller trucks, fewer drivers have to be paid to haul more goods, savings that might be passed on to consumers and businesses. A single large shipper such as International Paper expect to shave $70 million off of transportation costs, while the transition to different trucks would boost jobs in truck manufacturing.

• Environmentally beneficial – CTP argues that fewer-even-if-heavier trucks ultimately lead to greater fuel economy and lower emissions. They cite a study by the American Transportation Research Institute, which found that six-axel, 97,000-pound vehicles get 17 percent more ton-miles per gallon. Also, the U.S. Department of Transportation claims that this weight limit increase would result in reduced consumption of diesel fuel, a drop by 2 billion gallons annually.

Of note, Canada, Mexico and most European countries already allow larger vehicles than those in the U.S.

None of this changes the fact that our roads need fixing – and this promise of fuel efficiency, while a net plus for many reasons, would reduce revenues for the Highway Trust Fund, the key source of highway maintenance funding. Which is a huge concern that has yet to be effectively addressed.