The national ironman triathlon championship race is in Oklahoma this month. But just three months after harsh winter storms, literal potholes must be fixed.
When cities host triathlons, marathons, criterions, and other mass outdoor athletic events, it’s a smart draw for those municipalities to welcome visitors. The athletes and their families and friends often spend a weekend – as well as their tourist dollars at hotels, restaurants, and local attractions. It’s a time to spruce things up for the thousands of guests, of course.
But for any such large events that are staged on public streets and roads, the quality of the pavement is about more than just making the place look nice. Potholes in the streets it can affect the competition – slowing down a champion, or possibly causing serious accidents for talented athletes on expensive bicycles. One city that is addressing that in this moment is Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is hosting the <a href="https://www.ironman.com/im-tulsa">Ironman North American Championship</a> race on May 23, 2021.
The race is sold out at 2,500 athletes who will swim 2.4 miles in Keystone Lake, bike 112 miles through two counties (Osage Creek and Tulsa), and run a full marathon (26.2 miles) in downtown Tulsa. Originally scheduled for 2020, the race was postponed due to the pandemic.
<a href="https://www.fox23.com/news/video-street-crews-work-repair-roads-potholes-bicyclist-ironman-event-nears/ef9870e1-6bb9-45d1-b89e-3f553f2fb50c/">As reported on Fox-23 News</a> in Tulsa, another type of race began several weeks prior to the triathlon. City road crews had to patch or pave over a significant number of potholes on the race route. This Oklahoma city was affected by the deep freeze a few months earlier, in February, that famously knocked out power in the neighbor state of Texas for nearly a week. A series of severely cold winter storms swept through the region, dropping temperatures below zero (Fahrenheit), which was made worse as the frigid air was accompanied by snow and ice.
Particularly in regions where temperature dips like that are uncommon, such conditions can lead to pothole formation rather quickly. Tulsa, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston were all affected by those conditions and are now engaged in road repair this spring and likely into summer.
As much of America emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, public events such as triathlons are back on the calendar. Athletes who spent a year off from racing are coming back – but are the roads ready? And what about the places where they train, all over the country?
In June alone, there are five other triathlons scheduled in Texas (in Austin, Lakeway, Fort Worth, McKinney, and Pflugerville). Four more are planned for July (Navasota, The Colony, Waco, and Denton), and another four in August (Rockwall, Denton, Austin and McKinney).
That’s a lot of roads, a lot of potholes, and a lot of potential flat tires and accidents if the potholes cannot be fixed in time.

Are Tulsa's Roads Ironman Ready?

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1949" src="/uploads/rogers-park-bills-savage-bike-parts-54272ed9.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="675" />Injurious falls occur more often outside the home than in. Artists in Chicago are filling potholes with bicycle parts – perhaps reducing pothole dangers.
In this particularly cold and miserable winter of 2021, after the snow is sufficiently scraped or melted away from the streets of Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood, there are some filled-in potholes from late 2020 that should get more attention than road repairs typically do. That's because a collection of potholes – and one patchy section of sidewalk leading into a city park – has been filled with cement and artfully recycled bicycle parts.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1950" src="/uploads/rp-bill-save-bike-part-pholes-2-9d2194c2.jpg" alt="" width="480" height="640" />
The work by <a href="https://www.therecyclery.org/">The Recyclery Collective</a>, a non-profit that repairs discarded bicycles for extended use, was funded by a grant from AARP (formerly called the American Association of Retired Persons) to support "quick improvements by way of smart public projects." As illustrated in the photos, bits of derailleurs, brake rotors, speed cassettes, wheel axels, and chains are set in concrete that is used to fill spots of pavement failure.
This particular AARP grant of $7500 was made to improve accessibility, a concern for seniors as well as anyone with mobility issues living in urban areas. Heaved slabs of sidewalks, ungraded curb steps, potholes, and other pavement anomalies in fact are the cause of serious injury and death to individuals with mobility challenges – people who are otherwise encouraged to live active lifestyles as a means of forestalling the effects of aging.
<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1483851/">A study</a> published a few years ago ("Outdoor Falls Among Middle-Aged and Older Adults: A Neglected Public Health Problem," Wenjun Li PhD, et al., American Journal of Public Health, July 2006) examined risk factors for outdoor falls, supplementing the larger body of research on indoor slip-and-fall accidents. Their findings:
"Falls occurred outdoors more often than indoors among most age groups. Study participants who reported more leisure-time physical activity had a higher risk for outdoor falls. Most outdoor falls (73%) were precipitated by environmental factors, such as uneven surfaces and tripping or slipping on objects, and usually occurred on sidewalks, curbs, and streets. Walking (47.3%) was the most common fall-related activity."
The study conclusions go on to advise modifying environmental factors – which should include elimination of potholes.
More than one in four older adults falls every year, according to the National Safety Council, citing <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/falls/adultfalls.html">statistics</a> from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). If more of those falls happen outdoors, that means at least one in eight older adults has a fall outside. Of the total number of falls, outdoors and in, 800,000 patients are hospitalized due to such incidents. The most typical injuries are to the head (traumatic brain injuries) and hipbones (hip fractures).
This is not the first and only set of artistic potholes in Chicago. Artist <a href="https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/07/mosaic-vermin-by-jim-bachor/">Jim Bachor's</a> works in the Windy City, New York City, and elsewhere are detailed mosaics set in concrete pothole filler. He incorporates everything from political messaging to ironic takes on packaged food products, desserts, and at least one depiction of a rat have been photographed and featured in media such as Colossal, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, CBS Sunday Morning, Vivid, and The Art Guide.
What should be obvious is these artistic pothole-fillers are a way to get us to look at the ground we are walking on, think about the messaging, and avoid injurious falls. One might say that looking down is the new way of looking up.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1953" src="/uploads/rogers-park-sidewalk-bill-savage-e1613668629835-fe1f866e.jpg" alt="" width="1116" height="675" />Photo credits: Bill Savage/Chicago

Arty potholes, improved safety?

Tactile Mobility is building a platform for cars and trucks to monitor road quality. Motorists, fleets, and DOTs to get real-time data on bumps in the road.
Where it comes to the future of surface transportation – the ways and means to travel and transport on roads, streets and highways – it’s clear that engineers and technologists are working overtime. So many innovations are afoot: roads with embedded solar panels to power street lights and traffic signals; embedded cables to power electric vehicles by way of magnetic induction; “smart traffic signs” that wirelessly provide hazard warnings to cars and drivers instead of depending on visibility in poor weather; and “smart intersections” that alter the length of green lights to adapt to traffic levels and oncoming emergency vehicles.
But before these gee-whiz vehicle innovations come to fruition, we still have pavement pitted with potholes. Lots and lots of potholes. And with 2.7 million miles of asphalt pavement in the US alone, it’s unlikely that any of them will benefit from Jetsons-like technology in the near- or even mid-term future.
But one intervening technology that might reduce potholes is Tactile Mobile, which melds road-bump movement – “tactility,” as the company describes it – with visual data (cameras). It’s an electronic sensing and processing system that both sees and feels pavement anomalies.
Vehicles equipped with tactile in-vehicle processors record wheel speed (all four wheels), revolutions per minute (RPM), and torque transfer. That data then is then processed according to a proprietary algorithm, employing artificial intelligence (AI) to generate real-time actionable insights on the vehicle-road dynamics. 
The data from each vehicle is ingested in the cloud along with all other vehicles using the same technology plying the same and all other roads. The benefits of this technology imparts to the vehicle owner, as well as owners of commercial fleets where efficiencies (engine, braking, fuel, tires), can sizably affect operating costs. 
“SurfaceDNA is based on real time detection of pavement surface micro-events in the vehicle using Tactile Mobility,” says Yagil Tzur, head of product for Tactile Mobility. SurfaceDNA is a trademarked name for the portion of the product that is sold to departments of transportation, mapping companies, and insurers, among others; VehicleDNA, also trademarked, is the software that is vehicle-specific. “These streams of micro-events are uploaded to [our] Tactile Cloud which uses crowd sourcing to create several map layers including distresses and alerts. The alerts represent high priority events, which are transmitted and processed immediately in the cloud in real time. High priority events include, for example, high impact new potholes, hydroplaning, low grip conditions, and more.” 
In other words, the data can identify where pavement improvements are needed. Cities and states with road maintenance authority can use the data to make repairs soon after the need to fill potholes and other pavement breaks is first identified. Early repairs in asphalt pavement generally are most cost effective.
Of course the more vehicles that are equipped with the technology the greater the data and more effective the analyses and services they provide. “The technology is based on crowd sourcing and relies on the availability of a large number of vehicles carrying the technology,” says Tzur. 
And to what extent does that exist currently? He says the technology is already in test in existing vehicles in four municipalities in the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. “Tactile Mobility is engaged with few large, global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to start rolling out its embedded software as part of vehicle production,” continues Tzur. “Availability is expected by 2021. And from that point and onwards, it will grow as a product of additional OEMs implementing Tactile Mobility’s embedded solution as well as in existing OEMs, multiplying their number of vehicles year over year.” 
Tzur emphasizes that many municipalities currently conduct road condition surveys manually every 12 to 24 months, which might be flawed and not reflect where cars and trucks drive the most. “Tactile Mobility’s technology bridges the gap between both approaches as its solution is accurate, highly refreshed, and available in real time,” he says.

Vehicle-Mounted Sensors See and Feel Potholes

LVL5's "Pavdar" system – recording smartphone video from dashboards – may be the future of pothole detection. Already, it knows Michigan roads are the worst.
It's very hard to get a national, state or even citywide count of potholes on our streets and highways. Which is problematic in two ways: To repair them, first you have to know where they are. Second, to budget for those repairs, you have to know how many and how bad they are.
Google Satellite hasn't yet managed to provide a count because the technology isn't able to get that much information on the granular (potholes and pavement cracks) level (Pothole.info gets asked about this a lot). But there are some technologies in use that attempt to count potholes: Lidar – which uses laser pulses from a puck-like, roof mounted mechanism (as <a href="https://www.pothole.info/2018/03/driverless-cars-vs-potholes/">previously reported on Pothole.info</a>) – is being used by Uber, Toyota and other companies that are planning for the autonomous vehicle era.
With better detection of pavement problems those cars will operate with greater efficiency – and fewer flat tires. A single Lidar unit costs about $4,000 per set, which limits its use and adds to the cost of autonomous vehicles.
Pavdar can see the potholes – at a lower cost per car
But another technology is being deployed at a much lower price. It is called Pavdar, produced by a company called LVL5 (pronounced "level five"). It operates on smartphone cameras, mounted on car dashboards in such a way that the camera records an oblique-angle view of the roadway in front of the vehicle.
Pavdar is a new application of crowdsourcing, enlisting regular vehicle drivers in the quest to identify road imperfections like potholes and pavement barriers (it looks for other things as well, such as bollards, temporary obstructions, traffic-calming cutouts, etc.). Those drivers mount their own smartphones to face forward, turning their phones into dashcams that can see what's there, record it, and then transmit it to the central database. There a computer vision algorithm translates the footage into maps that rate road quality, pothole by pothole, and other traffic-impacting features.
LVL5 applies machine learning to create its high definition (HD) maps, which differs from Waze and Apple Maps, the familiar 2D routing maps in common use on smartphones and newer vehicles. HD maps are machine-readable and 3D representations of static features (road signs, traffic lights, curbs, lane lines) in the driving environment. The degree of accuracy is between five and 50 centimeters, sufficient to detect meaningful pavement imperfections.
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Can this help DOTs find and fix potholes more efficiently?
According to Andrew Kouri at LVL5, the technology is being evaluated by departments of transportation for road maintenance applications. While no municipality has yet to sign on to using it, "It can be a neutral voice," suggests Kouri. "Cities can now know where those imperfections are. It's impartial, not dependent on individuals who happen to be the type to phone in complaints."
Already 11,000 drivers – who are paid by the mile to use the phone app on their dashboards – are participating in the Pavdar system and providing this data (drivers are paid between one and five cents per mile; many of the motorists are ride-share drivers). The company <a href="https://medium.com/lvl5/introducing-crowdsourced-pavement-quality-maps-8ddafd15a903">published a map</a> in late 2018 that illustrated just how broadly it is in use. Just as important, this map ranked road quality by county, from best to worst. Across five million miles of US roads recorded by Pavdar, it found the best pavement is in Florida and the worst is in Michigan.
The company points out that Lidar-based systems lag in providing data to cities, where Pavdar is constantly updating because their collection methods are affordable and continuous. "LVL5 aims to help cities more efficiently maintain their roads by giving them up-to-date data that enables them to quickly identify road problems (e.g., crack in a road) before they become larger and more expensive issues (e.g., a pothole)," Kouri adds.
The firm also looked for correlations between high gas taxes and spending on construction in the effects of those things on road quality. Interestingly, there was no discernable correlation between higher spending and fewer potholes. It's unclear if "spending on construction" encompassed only new building and repaving, or also preventive maintenance (crack sealing and timely repairs to small potholes with permanent-fix asphalt). And to be fair, Michigan undergoes far more freeze-thaw conditions than Florida, the leading cause of potholes (but not the only cause; moisture of all kinds, traffic and high temperatures also contribute to asphalt deterioration).
"State and federal governments spend <a href="https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-government-spending-highway-infrastructure-en.jsp">over $400 billion</a> on maintaining and building new roads each year," says Kouri, raising important questions on infrastructure proposals, planning and execution.

Pothole Detection Via Smartphone Crowdsourcing

Monte Scott is just the latest to fill those craters with his own initiative. Meanwhile, the state’s governor and legislature mull a huge gas tax increase.
When both his mother and grandmother got flat tires on their cars from potholes on their street in late March, 12-year-old Monte Scott took matters into his own hands. He got a shovel, a barrel (without wheels) and some dirt, then filled in a few dozen potholes on the street outside his home in Muskegon Heights in western Michigan.
The story went viral –­ in social media (<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=monte%20potholes%20michigan&amp;src=typd">Twitter</a> and Facebook) as well as on traditional media (<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/04/01/michigan-boy-filling-potholes-video-goes-viral/3337610002/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories">USA Today</a>, New York Daily News, The London Daily Mail, Reason, The Hill, Essence magazine, Ebony magazine and television news stations in 25 states). One Tweet from the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, includes a video clip of her congratulating him and encouraging him to one day run for office.
It’s a great story of individual initiative (even if the pothole repair method, using dirt instead of asphalt, might need some alteration as time goes on). But it’s not isolated. As reported previously on Pothole.info, fed-up citizens in many parts of the country often repair potholes with their own grit and self-purchased materials. It’s just the way some people express their outrage and frustration at the expense of car repairs that result from damages caused by broken pavement.
Michigan <a href="https://www.pothole.info/2015/03/will-michigan-voters-decide-to-pay-more-for-infrastructure/">tried and failed in 2015</a> to pass a voter referendum to raise gas taxes to help pay for infrastructure repair, including crack sealing and repair of small potholes before they get bigger. Gov. Whitmer, elected in 2018, has turned to the state legislature to pass a 45-cents-per-gallon fuel tax increase to generate $2.5 billion for infrastructure repair.
“If we don’t raise the $2.5 billion we need to actually fix our roads the right way, with the right materials, the cost will continue to go up year after year,” Whitmer said in a statement that was reported by The Detroit News. “Patching potholes and ignoring the problem isn’t working. Instead, it’s hurting our families and businesses and holding our economy back.” She also cited numbers reported by The Road Information Program (TRIP), which says the state’s poor-quality roads, among the worst in the nation, add an average of $646 in vehicle operating costs to all cars in the state.
The tax would add, on average, $23 per month in gas costs per driver ($276 per year, which compares favorably to the TRIP figures). Whitmer’s political opponents in the state legislature criticized the plan for costing too much. Left unresolved is if the money would be spent on high-traffic roads or residential streets, such as the one Monte Scott was trying to repair.

Michigan Boy Fills Potholes on His Own

The media – social and traditional – has been on fire this week about potholes. More to the point, the extensive coverage and conversation is about who is fixing potholes. The fixer, by way of funding, is Domino's Pizza.
The chain is refreshingly transparent about their marketing angle in doing this. Even the press release concludes with a paragraph about buying a large, three-topping pizza ($7.99) so "customers can celebrate smooth roads." But perhaps of greater importance to motorists is the 15,000-store chain is neatly encapsulating in this campaign several important points about how potholes affect us all:
Bumpy roads affect commerce. When potholes slow deliveries of pizza – and no one wants cold pizza – it's bad enough. But entire business districts and regional economies can be affected by poor quality pavement. Pothole.info covered this a few years ago, pointing out <a href="https://www.pothole.info/2012/01/potholes-hurt-business-but-san-francisco-votes-to-fight-back/">the critical role of infrastructure in local economies</a>.
Bumpy roads are everywhere. The Domino's program (<a href="http://www.pavingforpizza.com">www.pavingforpizza.com</a>) will dole out $5,000 grants to 20 eligible cities all across the country. Thus far the winners are Bartonville, Texas; Milford, Delaware; Athens, Georgia; and Burbank, California. The company is still accepting applications from other cities who wish to receive the grant.
Municipalities need help. Revenues to city, state and federal coffers aren't keeping up with the natural wear and tear of asphalt. It's been a long time – more than a decade – since a voter referendum has passed authorizing an increase in gas taxes and other road user fees. The California legislature bravely <a href="https://www.pothole.info/2017/08/california-bucks-convention-with-gas-tax-increases-new-fees/">increased gas taxes and fees on electric vehicles in 2017</a> – but it may be a challenging factor to incumbent legislators seeking re-election in 2018.
Potholes can be repaired with a sense of humor. The Domino's-fixed potholes are spray-chalk painted with the familiar red-and-blue pizza chain logo, accompanied with the tagline, "OH YES WE DID."
Still, it makes sense that this company created something of this nature. We contacted Domino's' PR department and received a fast response (we think in about 30 minutes, about the time it takes to get a pizza delivered) about why this and why now. "We care about our customers and our pizzas and we know that potholes are a common concern for every driver (including our delivery drivers)," said a company spokesperson. "We didn't need any data to know that this is a common tension around the U.S. and one that, in our unique way, we are hoping to help with."
Most municipalities will take funding wherever they can get it. The city managers of one of the recipients, Milford, Delaware, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post explaining why he applied for and took the Domino's cash.
"I've worked in local government for 30 years, and attitudes toward taxes have been evolving," wrote Eric Norenburg, who previously worked in a similar position for Oberlin, Ohio. "Our residents have legitimate expectations that we will be careful with their dollars and limit increases in their taxes. And, if taxing formulas and methodologies are perceived as fair to everybody and we demonstrate good stewardship of our resources, then hopefully fewer people will complain about paying taxes. My job, as a professional local government manager, is to identify the best alternatives to providing crucial city services in an equitable manner and then bring those recommendations to our policymakers. Sometimes that means creative financing. And sometimes that means letting Domino's pick up the tab."
So who else might join in the fight to level the pavement? Grub Hub? UPS? FedEx? The United States Postal Service? There will be lots of potholes left after Domino's is done.

Domino's Pizza Now Delivering Pothole Fixes

Newer technologies are&nbsp;reinventing how we fix crumbling infrastructure &ndash;&nbsp;in particular,&nbsp;potholes. Cars, bikes, garbage trucks, and drones are part of it.<\/strong><\/p>
In an era when smartphones, &ldquo;smart cities,&rdquo; the Internet of Things (IoT), and &ldquo;the cloud&rdquo; litter our conversations, it may seem as if the discussion is moving far away&nbsp;from the basics of unbroken asphalt and smooth pavement. But in fact these are things that might mean fewer street potholes, more-efficient transportation &ndash; and lower infrastructure maintenance costs.<\/p>
This is because newer technologies&nbsp;can support municipal use of the digital revolution to detect, report, and initiate repairs of pavement. Some of these technologies &ndash; the cloud and smart phones, for example &ndash; work together. But actually there are several distinct developments that don&rsquo;t necessarily follow from each other, yet the collectively address the problem of deteriorating pavement in different and effective ways.<\/p>
A cluster of gee-whiz futuristic road maintenance technologies were on display at the Mobile World Congress gathering in Barcelona last year. Companies that included AT&amp;T, Inrix, Ericsson, Intel, Parkeon, See.Sense and Cisco shared ways in which remote sensors, wireless technology, Big Data, the cloud &ndash; with sensor mounts on&nbsp;drones, garbage trucks and bicycles &ndash; can help detect and sometimes respond in real time to weather patterns, traffic &ndash; and potholes.<\/p>
For example, See.Sense is a Northern Ireland firm that makes a $99 sensor that is attached to bicycles and uses the cyclist&rsquo;s smartphone to communicate the presence of potholes (as well as factors relating to air quality) to city monitors. It basically allows community-minded (and pothole-fearing) cyclists to put their pavement proximity to work.<\/p>
The consensus of attendees at the show, according to Computerworld magazine, was that various forms of IoT are in the earliest phases of development, but that these technologies are showing us the realm of the possible.<\/p>
Here are some other pavement-related technological innovations:<\/p>
Boston&rsquo;s Street Bump<\/strong> &ndash;&nbsp;This city leveraged in 2012 the considerable brain trust of its educational institutions with the Mayor&rsquo;s Office of New Urban Mechanics to develop its Street Bump program. It&rsquo;s a phone app-based system that employs the technology of vertical accelerometers &ndash; which record sudden up-down movement &ndash; combined with GPS data. Motorists engage it&nbsp;as they begin a driving trip. Through the statistical accumulation of many drivers using the app &ndash; crowdsourcing &ndash; bumps in the road that turn up most frequently get the city&rsquo;s most urgent attention.<\/p>
Google&rsquo;s vertical accelerometer\/GPS patent<\/strong> &ndash; The company most recognized for its search engine is also leading in the driverless car arena, which is why in 2015 it patented software that is similar to Boston&rsquo;s Street Bump. Google&rsquo;s program will likely be incorporated into driverless cars to detect potholes, which subsequently enables other cars with compatible technology to&nbsp;avoid. Concurrently, the Google cars will supply that information to the municipality to prompt repairs. DitigalTrends.com reported on the software, adding, &ldquo;empirical data might just help convince skeptics to address the U.S.&rsquo;s chronic infrastructure shortfall.&rdquo<\/p>
City of York, England garbage trucks<\/strong> &ndash; Why depend on drivers and bicyclists to cover all a city&rsquo;s streets when the garbage trucks are doing it already on a weekly basis? Both the northern UK city of York and Thurrock Council (near London) are using pothole identification technology mounted to refuse collection trucks to find the potholes in the earliest stages of development. As is well understood, cracks and small potholes can be repaired at a much lower cost when caught early, versus having to repave altogether a few years later.<\/p>
Leeds University&rsquo;s drones<\/strong> &ndash; With a $6.4 million grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the University&rsquo;s research engineers are working on &ldquo;perceive and patch&rdquo; drones that will actually find and repair potholes. According to PopularMechanics.com, which reported on the study at its launch in 2015, &ldquo;a bigger issue is overcoming the payload limitations of drones,&rdquo; says the site. &ldquo;For a drone to fix a pothole, it must be able to transport heavy construction materials such as cement or asphalt. While there are efforts to create drones that can carry more weight without being too cumbersome and clumsy themselves, perhaps the more realistic solution is to use multiple drones flying in formation to carry heavy payloads.&rdquo<\/p>
Which paints quite a picture. But with so much interest in making the streets and highways smoother, safer, and less costly, these lurches forward to new technologies certainly seem like positive developments. Even if there are a few bumps along the way.<\/p>

Sensors, GPS and Crowdsourcing vs. Potholes

More than just a few municipalities are throwing in the towel on bad pavement. Replacing their potholes are gravel and dirt roads – which have their own issues.<\/strong><\/p>\nTwo noteworthy American cities about 1400 miles apart are chewing up rutted, potholed pavement and replacing them with dirt and gravel. The reason this is happening boils down to money – or a lack thereof. But others argue it's just a matter of poor long-term planning and bad short-term decisions.<\/p>\nIn a nice neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska, where homes on large lots sell for $400,000 and more, the city road crews chewed up the decades-old asphalt streets and replaced them with dirt and gravel in the summer of 2016. This isn't happening all over the town, just in neighborhoods where an original agreement determined that the streets needed no curbs and gutters and that homeowners were responsible for repaving when needed. Residents complained when the roads started falling apart, of course, but this latest move to de-paving culminates a long-standing refusal on their part to pay for asphalt maintenance.<\/p>\nOther areas of Omaha didn't have this agreement and those streets are kept paved and well maintained. The 10,000 residents in the affected areas would need to come up with $300 million to restore their streets to asphalt.<\/p>\nThis same retro solution is also being applied in Montpelier, Vermont. The nation's smallest capital city, population 7,855 in the 2010 census, has decided that dwindling funds for infrastructure repairs are best used to grind up decrepit streets and turn them to dirt and gravel. Some residents and city leaders claim it is quaint and a nod to Yankee ingenuity and frugality. The owner of a car repair shop <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/2016\/07\/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-roads-cant-afford-fix\/\" target=\"_blank\">told Wired<\/em> magazine<\/a> that when well maintained, dirt-and-gravel roads are kinder to cars than heavily-potholed pavement.<\/p>\nWhich indirectly gets to an important point: even dirt and gravel roads need repairs and maintenance. Yes, gravel roads too can get damaging dips and bumps if not given proper attention or under unexpectedly adverse weather conditions such as flooding. Add how traffic on gravel streets can kick up dust, affecting cars, homes and air quality and it's easy to see how this is less than a perfect solution.<\/p>\nAs people across the country are discovering. There are an estimated 1.6 million miles of unpaved roads in at least 27 states in the U.S. While that may seem dismal, they have to be considered in relationship to a score assigned to paved roads and bridges by the American Society of Civil Engineers to American roadways. That's a letter D grade, poor road conditions largely attributed to how spending by federal, state and local departments of transportation hasn't kept up with inflation. Because the costs of asphalt, cement and concrete have gone up even more than other goods, we effectively are spending nine percent less today than in 2003 – even while natural population increases mean more traffic plies and further damages those cracking, pitted and pockmarked highways.<\/p>\nOne organization takes a strategic look at this and says it's due to poor planning. Strong Towns, a non-profit advocacy group, says that in Omaha the original agreement was made by homeowners who just didn't seem to care about what would happen in the future. "Let the guy who's in charge 20 years from now worry about that," <a href=\"http:\/\/www.strongtowns.org\/journal\/2016\/8\/23\/more-potholed-roads-turn-to-gravel?rq=Omaha\">the organization's website<\/a> sarcastically imagines how the conversation went. "Something gets lost in the math between 'The city should keep up our roads' and 'we don't want to personally pay for them,'" muses a Strong Towns column.<\/p>\nThere are technological dynamics that might make a difference in how this plays out. In Montpelier they use <a href=\"https:\/\/www.usfabricsinc.com\/geotextileapplications\/pavedunpavedroadparking\" target=\"_blank\">geotextile<\/a>, a durable and permeable fabric, to reinforce the dirt and gravel that minimizes erosion and drainage problems. Pothole repairs in asphalt too have fillers that offer varying degrees of longevity. While most asphalt applied in wet winter and spring conditions is temporary (and disappointing), some advanced asphalt formulations are permanent.<\/p>\nStrong Towns takes a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.strongtowns.org\/the-growth-ponzi-scheme\/\" target=\"_blank\">dim view of suburban sprawl<\/a>, examining how municipal and state leaders emphasize building without financial planning for long-term maintenance. These gravel roads might be a harbinger of things to come – or a wake up call to allocate more money to preventive maintenance and repairs.<\/p>\n

Adios Pavement, Hello Gravel?

Everyone loves Canada and Canadians. But it seems their potholes are very sad and very neglected.
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Pothole Sadness From Edmonton

Maintenance costs for a road connecting small communities in the Hudson Bay region were cut in 2015 – and the predictable increase in potholes arrived on cue.
James Bay Road (JBR) in northwestern Quebec (Canada) is a two-lane, 388-mile journey from the town of Matagami in the province's interior north to Radisson, a village of about 500 people. The termination point is 1500 kilometers (about 900 miles) north of Toronto. It was built in the early 1970s to accommodate the development of hydroelectric projects in the James Bay region, which is the southern bulb of the Hudson Bay.
This northern area and highway, as one might expect, are largely frozen during the winter months. Which means the paved road takes quite a beating ­– although perhaps less due to low traffic and a solid stretch of time when temperatures remain below freezing, avoiding some of the freeze-thaw cycles in southern Canada and the U.S. that create potholes. But roads of that age will deteriorate without regular maintenance, as First Nation residents who regularly use it are well aware.
Ryan Erless, an indigenous Cree nation resident in the town of Waskaganish on the James Bay shore – which like several such towns have a gravel-only road connecting to James Bay Road – is part of a Facebook group called "James Bay Highway Road Conditions." Its 4,400 members report in on how the highway is doing, much of it focused on a noticeable and increasing degree of pavement deterioration. It's no small coincidence that Hydro-Quebec, the huge quasi-governmental utility that maintains the road, has reduced funds for fixing JBR pavement by 40 percent as of 2015.
"The potholes look like they're getting worse," Erless told Nation News, a publication with a readership of 105,000 who are largely Cree and other residents of this region. The print and online publication reported that Erless took matters into his own hands by installing orange pylons in the deepest of potholes as a warning to other drivers.
"I'm hoping people will see my pylons and know that the road needs fixing," he said.
Erless' efforts might have been effective. The provincial transport minister announced in April that $97.5 million (Canadian) will be spent over five years to fix the worst of problems along the James Bay Road, the largest such allocation in the highway's 40+ year history. The annual budget for maintenance (including dispersal of road salt during the winter) had been $4.8 million but was reduced to $2.7 million in 2015. The alliance of residents in the region, the Cree-Jamesien, has proposed that $8.2 million should be spent.
Erless suggested that even a large infusion from Quebec Province won't fix every pothole. "There's 600 kilometers worth of road that need to be fixed," he said. "97 million is not going to do very much, especially when some potholes aren't fixed properly and become a problem again every spring."
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Pothole Pylons Warn Drivers on Quebec's James Bay Road

We've always heard the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Panama City, Panama it's the tweeting potholes that get fixed.
The city by the big canal is growing by leaps and bounds, with newly built high-rise condominiums, office towers, banks and hotels changing the skyline. But the streets haven't kept up with the buildings – in fact, construction has probably contributed to the poor quality of the city's streets already suffering from years of neglect. So a local news station, Telemetro Reporta, engaged the marketing firm P4 Ogilvy &amp; Mather to tweet-shame the city into taking action.
It's tactically simple and likely to inspire imitators wherever cars meet pavement deterioration. The agency placed six, five-inch diameter, hockey-puck shaped devices, emblazoned with the familiar hashtag symbol (#) and comprised of motion sensors, pressure gauges and RF transmitters. Coordinators place them manually, then move them every few days to different potholes in streets of the city's downtown. When a car, truck or bus tire triggers the device, a Twitter account <a href="https://twitter.com/search?vertical=default&amp;q=the%20tweeting%20pothole&amp;src=typd" target="_blank">tweets a message</a> to the Panamanian Ministry of Public Works.
Preloaded messages include "Fix me! I'm endangering lives!," "I feel horrible. I just caused tire damage to an old lady's car," "Hit me baby one more time. OK no, just avoid me," "Tru…ck…whe…els…a…re…hit..ing…me…it…hu…rts…" and "If I can wait a year to watch Game of Thrones again, I can wait for @MOPdePanamato to fix me."
The campaign launched in April 2015 and by August more than 2,000 such tweets were sent and 5,500 followers generated. Add television coverage and Twitter interactions to make 29.3 million media impressions. A spokesperson for the agency handling the project told Newsroom.cisco.com, "Work on the first hole that tweeted started within 24 hours," he said. "They are reacting rather fast."
Why is social media the new tool for fixing streets? "We feel that what made this fun and engaging was that we actually turned the potholes into characters, a superhero of sorts, with a rather funny personality," the spokesperson said.
Inquiries about copying the campaign and specifically the tweeting devices have come from India, Ireland, the UK and South Africa. These are potholes with a voice – heard on a global scale.
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Panama's Tweeting Potholes

American motorists should know that pothole problems are not limited to the United States. Pavement is pavement, all over the world, as well as the inevitable potholes. Enough so that in the United Kingdom there is Mr. Pothole, who self describes as "the National Pothole Campaigner in the UK."
<a href="http://www.mr-pothole.co.uk/" target="_blank">Mr. Pothole</a> (a.k.a. Mark Morrell) tours the country, works his messages through social media, and is an organizer of National Pothole Day in the UK. Held on January 15, 2015, the program helped launch a reporting app that engages citizens in road assessment. It was broadly supported by political leaders and local streets authorities.
In the U.S., similar attention is lent to pothole repair but conducted on a local basis – and perhaps a little less theatrically. Some examples:
<ul>
<li>In New Jersey, the state Department of Transportation, faced with more potholes than usual after a grueling winter – 300,000 in 2015 versus 180,000 in a typical year – has launched a pothole <a href="http://www.nj.gov/transportation" target="_blank">reporting website</a> and phone line (800-POTHOLE) and has 13 pothole filling machines deployed across the state.</li>
<li>Cincinnati has a campaign underway in 2015 to address an estimated 20,000 potholes there. The city's mayor is calling on residents to report via a smartphone app, online or a call center number (513-591-6000). The city is reporting the status on reported potholes on<a href="http://http://www.dot.state.oh.us/districts/D06/Pages/ReportaPothole.aspx" target="_blank"> its website</a>, promising repairs within seven days.</li>
<li>In New Orleans (yes, even in warm-weather climates potholes happen), the ABC-TV affiliate WGNO-TV features a "pothole of the day" on its <a href="http://wgno.com/category/news-with-a-twist/pothole-of-the-day/">website</a>. Videos first broadcast on the news program includes nearby residents who experience the pothole on a daily basis. Selected potholes get a sandwich board sign to warn motorists.</li>
<li>In West Chester, Pennsylvania, the city 25 miles west of Philadelphia with a population of 18,400 has eight crews dedicated to filling potholes this spring. Motorists here are urged to phone PennDOT (484-340-3201) to assist with identifying the worst cases affecting traffic. This part of eastern Pennsylvania was badly affected by the winter of 2015.</li>
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In North America as in Europe, the pothole problem is a matter of basic science: Cracks in pavement will harbor moisture which, when subjected to freezing, expand to cause a bigger crack. As water seeps below the top level of pavement, erosion, more water and refreezing result. Ultimately the sub-pavement washes out and a pothole develop. Problems are most acute in low areas where water collects, such as where roadways dip under viaducts.
Back in Britain, Mr. Pothole uses social and traditional media to get the message out and prompt repairs. "I took pictures, reported [the potholes] via my website and posted them on Twitter," he told Pothole.info about National Pothole Day. "The next day I went out and, surprise surprise, the councils had fixed many of them. Strange what happens when Mr. Pothole hits town."
Indeed, Mr. Pothole, reporting works pretty well on both sides of the pond. For more, read up about <a href="http://www.pothole.info/potholesreported/" target="_blank">SeeClickFix</a>, an app available to American volunteer pothole-killers.
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