In the widening gulf between municipal budgets and road pavement quality, is there any hope the roads will get fixed?

Every mayor in America – and Canada and much of the rest of the world – gets elected on a promise to fix potholes. But when elected officials settle into the executive suite they often find out they have about 30 cents available for every dollar needed to fix those potholes – and that putting off those repairs for three or four years will mean the math gets much, much worse. The pavement deteriorates exponentially over time while road maintenance budgets shrink.

Making matters worse, the throw-and-go method of using hot mix has two additional deficiencies. One is that its use is restricted in cold and rainy conditions. The other is because a low-quality hot mix rarely lasts more than a few months. Reapplication of hot-mix in warmer months multiplies material and labor costs several times over. Meanwhile, those mayors and their departments of streets get an earful from dissatisfied citizens who have damaged cars and drive in slower traffic due to rough pavement.

Temperature extremes have a way of driving innovation. The Inuit, centuries before there were Ray Bans, would strap bone, tusks or bark to their faces, with a thin slit cut to allow their eyes to peer out. This would protect them from snow blindness, a real malady when a landscape of clean white snow and blinding sunshine would coincide. Perhaps it was something far ahead of its time: They looked like something that might easily be worn today by pop singer Lady Gaga.

Researchers in Minnesota, another snow-swept land (albeit a bit further south), are being equally inventive about how to fix potholes in the future. They are testing microwave technology to heat potholes in midwinter as a method to fix pavement before springtime – when those potholes will be larger, more dangerous and more expensive. Taking it a step further, the researchers are looking at using locally mined and recycled materials as a means of making the technology work even better.

For U.S. motorists in any parts of the million-square-mile area under the heat dome of 2011 – with temperatures in the 90s and 100s (Fahrenheit), and heat indices 20 and 30 points higher in some places – there’s more to worry about than engine coolant and functioning air conditioners. Add exploding potholes to the list.

Actually, it’s pavement that is exploding, leaving potholes in its wake. This largely occurs with asphalt roads. Where concrete slabs are used in highway construction, the danger is buckling, as when one-ton chunks of concrete push upward due to the expansion effect of heat, creating dangerous steps and ramps in the roads.

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.

With any business start-up, there is the lingering question of “if you build it, will they come?” And even if they do, will it mean anything?

But that is not the worry with developers, investors or users of SeeClickFix, the phone app enabling citizen engagement in pothole abatement. Citizens are coming, local governments are responding – and the potholes are getting fixed.

The surprise is that all these volunteer pothole reporters are also helping municipalities save money. Public employees who used to be tasked with finding the potholes and receiving phone-in pothole complaints can now shift to other functions. That might include more crews who actually repair the streets – to the cheers of motorists, cyclists and elected officials.