Los Angeles, City of Potholes

Potholes aren't terribly common around here (Wisconsin)... but they're not unheard of.

A more common thing is for our roads to become very bumpy and similar to driving over a washboard. When comparatively warmer weather comes after extended sub-freezing temperatures, the expansion and contraction of the concrete due to the temperature change creates very bumpy roads. At night, your headlights really do a good job of illustrating the problem.

Sometimes potholes form... but on the roads I regularly travel, however, they're not very big or very deep.

In New Hampshire, I'd swear they were using the roads to farm potholes for export to other states. There would be groups of potholes strategically placed so that it was impossible to swerve around all of them at any speed. Shops that did alignments did a great deal of business.

Here in Utah, though, our city pays very close attention to potholes. If a pothole appears in midwinter, inside of a week it is filled in with gravel, and as soon as the warm weather hits, half the roads are closed for repair and the potholes are promptly fixed.

Rain destroys asphalt roads because asphalt - being oil - repels water. This seems odd, but it make sense. When a car drives over a wet ashpalt road, the wheels force water into any small cracks or crevices that exist, or into the spaces between the small gravel pebbles and the asphalt binding them together. Since the water cannot be absorbed into the asphalt, the water acts as a wedge, forcing the cracks open. In a few hours, any heavily trafficked wet asphalt road will be ripped to bits. If you read old highway engineering magazines, from the early 20th century, when asphalt was first being promoted for use on roads, it was always promoted as a temporary "dress coat" and not a permanent road surface. It was assumed that the road base would be concrete, and the asphalt was only a thin surface to make the road smoother. The road base would be concrete, because concrete absorbs water; indeed, the more water it absorbs over the years, the stronger it gets (it is curing). It was assumed that the asphalt dressing would be replaced frequently. What happened is that, in later years, because asphalt roadway is cheaper than concrete, it often replaced concrete. The result are the poor streets, especially residential streets that don't have a concrete base.

It's not just you. After over 2 feet of snow and three days of rain the roads in AZ (including the highways) are disasterous. Potholes everywhere!

Iam: Thanks for the information, that's excellent.

Oh, man, you could start a blog about nothing but potholes!!

I live in the greater Kansas City (Mo) metro area, and believe me, we know potholes. In the last study conducted by the city of KC, they found that the oldest "temporary metal plate" used to cover potholes was in place for seven years. They hooked up some measuring device to a car, and the record was 77 bumps in 5 minutes. No joke.

A few years ago, we drove to Colorado on vacation, and laughed ourselves silly when we came across a road sign that said, "rough road ahead" -- and it was smoother than any road/highway/street in Mo. We're still debating if 1)someone forgot to take down the sign after road construction (after our amazement that someone would actually *post* such a sign); 2)there actually does exist a state wherein a few bumps are apologized for by a DOT; 3)Mo is a road hellhole. (Well, #3 is a given.)

If you haven't had to drive faster over a crumbling bridge to attain the loft required to soar over the gaping holes...why, you've never been to Mo.

Wankers.