Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

I think they should have included the official NYC procedure, which is:

1. Dig out around the affected area

2. leave massive dent in the surface for what seems like years

3. Maybe cover it with a few janky bits of wood and/or metal sheets that make a hideous clanking noise all day and night and have the same approximate surface friction as an ice rink so are pretty murderous to any 2-wheeled road user

4. Leave this solution to mature like a fine wine

5. I really mean single malt whiskey. You can leave it basically as long as you like

6. There is no step six.

View on HN

Whoa, fancy. All we get are open pits with a few barricades around them until the news finally starts talking about the tree growing in the middle of the road.

Luxury! We used to dream of open pits. All we ever had were craters filled with broken glass and burning petrol. And surrounded by rabid alligators.

Yeah, that's what we used to have but they got a federal grant to improve things.

‘Course where i grew up we had it ‘ard. Aye… We’d get woken up 2 o’clock in the mornin’ after sleeping in a road crater filled with sulphuric acid, race down the street naked in the dead o’ winter to distract the hungry velociraptors while one of us used a dull butter knife to chop off a limb we’d throw into the road hole so the steamroller could come by, flatten it to patch the hole, then use the stump to tamp the edges into place. And drivers these days keep complaining how tough it is to get a pothole fixed…

You should find Seat Safety Switch on tumblr.

My understanding is the DOT gets pissy if locals fill in the pothole themselves, but I imagine that there's enough interested people to do vigilante road repair if they weren't subject to government harrassment.

"Vigilante Road Repair" - cool band name - I call it!

My understanding is the DOT gets pissy if locals fill in the pothole themselves

People in Chicago sometimes do this.

It's common enough that WGN Morning News parodied it by having its sports anchor go out and start filling potholes with giardiniera.

https://wgntv.com/video/pat-fills-potholes-with-giardiniera/...

Simply paint a penis around the pothole.

Pick it up and drop it on the road outside a local politician's house, there'll be a repair crew there fixing it the next day.

nobody leaves a dent in the surface on purpose, the problem is that whatever caused the pothole is almost certainly still causing it to sink under the surface. A patch doesn't fix the problem, it just makes it less bad.

Less bad is ok.

Yep. Step 0 in the above list is "build a road with insufficient subsurface/foundation preparation and drainage"

There's a section of town that was developed on an old swampy bit of land. They drained the swamp but did not let the land dry/settle long enough after draining the water. This caused parts of the road to sink, but not enough to break/crack the roads. Instead, they just have swells as you're driving along. It's actually impressive on how much sinking happened without breaking the road itself.

The local obscenely named utility company dug in our road a few years ago, necessitating a large patch. They proceeded to drive through their patch as they left. The tire dents & ridges are still there years later. You're right, of course, but I think you may be overestimating the concern patch crews give to their craft.

That's a method in the manual - "roll-and-go". The fact that it's still there years later is actually proof that the patch was effective, if maybe not well applied.

That's ... How you compact a patch.

Anyhow, it doesn't matter how much care they put into the job, if the substrate fails the road fails. Simple as that. Patches are temporary fixes.

Eh, maybe I didn't describe it well. We're talking 1 lane wide, maybe 80 ft long. Dually tire path through the patch. Indented, with the displaced material ridged up along the side, diagonal across the lane. It yanks my motorcycle tire sideways if I hit it, and it's a decent bump in a car. If that's… how you compact it, we need new standards.

I like Atlanta’s solution even better: after becoming egregious enough sloppily bolt down a much too tall metal plate over the pothole and those that have proliferated nearby. Cross fingers and hope they won’t coalesce as a sink hole and as with everything else: “Go Dawgs”

My wife told me once a pothole on her daily commute through Oakland got big enough that a homeless person took up residence in it.

Or the Parks and Rec procedure, which is "Call Ron Swanson and have some Lagavulin ready".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com