So I’ve lived in other cities (such as Minneapolis and Nashville,) and I’ve certainly visited a lot of cities, and I have never, ever, E.V.E.R. seen anything even remotely like the potholes of Portland, OR. This pic at least will give everybody some idea, but trust me, I see worse constantly. And I’m driving all over the entire metro area for work this spring, so I’m seeing just how common these streets really are-- they’re EVERYWHERE, with no warning at all. You’ll be driving down a perfectly normal street, and then suddenly… well, the above pic. Or worse, or tar pits, possibly with a brontosaurus at the bottom.
The story is that when these roads were originally built, developers weren’t required to pave them. So some of them were never paved, and the city isn’t required to maintain them if they weren’t built in the first place. The only way this would ever happen is if all the homeowners on the block chipped in and paid for paving, milling, etc. (Guess how often that happens?) Now, I don’t know if this really explains it or not, but I definitely know that I’ve never seen anything like this anywhere else. Does this actually happen to this extent in ANY other city???
It doesn’t have anything to do with paving, gravel roads potholes just like asphalt roads. What the main cause is, is improper construction techniques. If the road isn’t compacted correctly, water leaks in, freezes and expands. This causes potholes since it displaces dirt.
Montreal has streets like that every spring. Paved streets. The French word for pothole translates as hen’s nest (nid de poule) but they call these ostrich nests. Or worse. Then they patch them and they get worse the following year.
Is that picture a good representation of the city’s streets? I think that when a tree is planted right in the middle of the street, you really shouldn’t expect a smooth road.
To me, I prefer consistency. In most of Manhattan, the roads are pretty decent, except that there will occasionally be a random pothole that could technically be called a lake. I recently witnessed a Chinese food delivery man on a bike who apparently didn’t see one of these. About half his front tire was swallowed up by the hole, and he and his food went flying about 30 feet or so.
No, it’s not. It’s one of the many unpaved short sections of street that dot the city and is not a fair representation of city streets*. Dirt roads are subject to duck ponds and wash-boarding, especially in a rainy climate. The paved roads here are no worse than any other city of any size; certainly not as bad as Anchorage was. The city is quick to respond to calls about potholes in paved roads, but the present mayor has stated that there is no money to pave unpaved sections in residential areas at this time.
*I deliver Meals on Wheels and see sections like that on occasion, but they are a small minority.
Someone else who lives here! Yay! Yes, the paved roads are fine; the unpaved ones… well, let’s just say that I see a LOT of them, and one of these days I’m sure I’ll have the chance to witness a forgotten dinosaur from the mists of time lumbering out of one of the potholes and eating a car. :eek:
Do you know if the story about the original developers not paving the roads are actually true?
There are a number of us: The Soggy Dozen, if you will, including many of the posters in this thread. I don’t know the story you refer to, but Czarcasm probably does, as he’s been here much longer than I have. I’ll say that I was surprised when I started discovering these unpaved sections of street in a city this size, with no apparent rhyme or reason to them.
All of our unpaved streets look like that in spring. An alarming number of our paved ones don’t look much better - freezing and thawing plays hell on asphalt streets.
The only reason our gravel road doesn’t look like that is because one of our neighbors owns an excavating company runs his grader over the road several times a year.
I know the cities and towns around here are really struggling with road maintenance and even sometimes opting to let streets revert to gravel because there were deep cuts to local funding during the last decade or so and their citizens can’t afford more property taxes.
Generally speaking*, the pattern in most of the U.S. has been to allow developers to buy up sections of land and then, well, develop them, which means not just building housing but laying out internal roads and other infrastructure to connect with the larger area’s grid. Generally again, the state or community sets requirements and minimums that the developer must meet. It’s hard to sell more upscale housing unless the surrounding area is at an equally high level, but some sites are aimed at providing the lowest cost housing - because that satisfies a real need - and will cut any corners to keep costs low. Over time residents in the development can and do fund amenities, but not everywhere and every time.
My guess is that in cold weather states, non-paved roads outside of truly rural areas are rare simply because everybody knows what havoc plows wreak. Potholes are from freeze-thaw cycles and a fact of life but paving minimizes them as well. Oregon isn’t what I would call a cold weather state and Portland is not a snowy city, so historically developers wouldn’t have had much incentive not to cut costs by eliminating paving.
*Really general: we’re talking thousands of places over a century so YMMV.
In Port-Au-Prince, Haiti that would be a fairly good road. Sometimes you have not just potholes, but what is best described as sink holes to the drainage piping system perhaps 3-5 ft below grade, along with regularly missing (or locally recycled) manhole covers with equal drops. Oncoming traffic has to share the same path with each other often (and somehow it works usually much better then US city traffic).
Well, that’s a sinkhole not a pothole, but if you want to go that route, here’s a picture from Milwaukee a few years back. The SUV was running and in drive and since it has automatic 4WD people were to nervous about it the weight shifting around and it lurching forward so they left it down there for (I think) two days until it ran out of gas. There was also some exposed electrical conduits that powered a nearby hospital that they didn’t want to accidentally knock out.
Unincorporated Oakland County, MI (a county northwest of Detroit, MI) purposely leaves some residential roads unpaved since it cuts down on the amount of traffic.
The UK city I live in, Sheffield, has the reputation for the worst potholes in the country. Typing “Sheffield potholes” into the google bar brought up the suggestion “Sheffield pothole city”. We don’t have the excuse of dirt roads either.
In March 2010, after a hard winter, 32,000 potholes were identified, up sixfold from the year before. Since then there have been strenuous efforts to fix the problem. Or at any rate strenuous efforts by the local council to look as though they are fixing it. Check out this article from our local paper.
Yes, the paved roads are fine; the unpaved ones… well, let’s just say that I see a LOT of them, and one of these days I’m sure I’ll have the chance to witness a forgotten dinosaur from the mists of time lumbering out of one of the potholes and eating a car. :eek:
