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Volunteers Fix Potholes in Escondido February 2012
From time to time, news will surface that someone got so fed up with a particular pothole that he or she filled and fixed it them self.
George Weir of Escondido has been doing that for three years, but on a much grander scale. The owner of Escondido Asphalt, Inc. (and several other businesses in construction and agriculture) has been putting between $80,000 and $100,000 of company resources to work in each of the past three years on the city’s roads, streets and alleys.
Potholes Hurt Business, But San Francisco Votes to Fight Back January 2012
The voters of San Francisco understand a basic fact about potholes. By a two-to-one margin in a November 2011 referendum, they approved a $250 million bond measure to fix their streets.
It was a bold move in recessionary times, and the vote might provide a case study from which the rest of the country might learn. Throughout the country, from the expressways of California to the bridges of New Jersey – with thousands of other spans in between, including 3,538 bridges closed for safety deficiencies in 2010 alone – crumbling infrastructure is plaguing business. Efforts to restore streets and bridges to safe, smooth passageways can have a beneficial impact on commerce; as of now, the opposite is happening.
Hot, Cold and Recycled: Different Asphalts for Different Conditions January 2012
America has spent more than one trillion dollars building its infrastructure of streets, roads, highways and superhighways. Because that building program began decades ago – for cars and bicycles 100 years ago, and in earnest since the 1950s – much of that investment today is crumbling. Potholes are everywhere – but so too is the innovative drive to plug up those breaks in asphalt (most roads are built with asphalt, although some are made with concrete).
Glassphalt: Have Roads Made with Recycled Glass Changed Pavement? July 2011
When the City of New York repaved a section of Fifth Avenue twenty years ago along the front of the Plaza Hotel with something called glassphalt, the pavement sparkled from tiny flecks of recycled glass in the aggregate mix. But it was neither the recycled nature of the glass, nor the resilience with which the material can stand up to the traffic and temperature swings of the Big Apple, that caught the attention of the hotel owner, Donald Trump. The famous real estate magnate just liked how the street glistened.
And he wanted more of this glassphalt, according to a 1991 Knight-Ridder wire story in. True to form, Trump demanded that the other streets ringing the hotel get the same shimmering, glass-infused pavement.
Potholes: How They Happen, How We Try to Fix Them May 2011
A pothole by definition is a problem. No one intends for a pothole to form and exist – they are not here by intent. Unfortunately, the technology does not yet exist to build impenetrable pavement because all roads are subject to inevitable atrophy. The best we can hope is to minimize pothole formation for as long as possible.
To know the best ways to fix potholes – and prevent them from forming in the first place – it helps to understand how pavement is constructed and what it is about the road surface that typically fails. Second, it helps to think of pavement as somewhat like human skin: both will eventually age, but a little help – fixing small cracks before they get bigger, for example – can go a long way toward keeping things looking and working better for a longer period of time.
Will Iron Ore Byproducts be the Next Pothole Repair Material? March 2011
Pothole.info continues to be the go-to source of information on potholes and how they affect our lives.
According to television news reporter Mark Albert on KSAX-TV in Minneapolis, “The website Pothole.info says, ‘drivers will spend $330 each year repairing your car from these hazards.’”
That was the bad news. But there may be better news on the prairie horizon, says Albert. He notes that the potholes in the Twin Cities in 2011 are “historic.” Addressing that problem, Albert spoke with a road crew working with pothole repair material from a Mendota Heights, Minn. company, TCC Materials. They are testing a pothole repair method using taconite aggregates, derived from iron ore mined in the considerable iron range areas of Minnesota.