It was a dark and stormy night. It was raining so hard everyone had to have their wipers on at top speed — even the pedestrians.
It was already hard to spot the potholes, but now that they were full of water, you couldn’t tell what was just a puddle and what was a crater. Up ahead were two lurking potholes. To stay in my lane, I had to drive through at least one. I know I was going to pick the wrong one, just like I always pick the wrong line at McDonald’s.
So I drive into this pothole and emerge about 11 minutes later.
OK, slight exaggeration, but it was big. Big enough that when the left front wheel dropped into it, and the suspension bottomed out with a big THUD, I yelled out some deity’s name in vain.
Apparently, this was not the only pothole in the city of Toronto. Myles Currie, the city’s director of transportation services, told me that in 2008 the city fixed 277,000 potholes. So far this year, it has already fixed about 75,000, almost 100 per cent more than for the same three-month period in 2008.
Currie “filled me in,” pun intended, on some pothole fun facts.
The main contributor to how many potholes are created is the number of freeze-thaw cycles we get. When it’s above freezing, melting snow and ice creeps into cracks to get below the road. Then when things freeze shortly after, the below-the-road water becomes ice, which expands and pushes up the asphalt. Then when vehicles drive over that pushed-up asphalt, it usually breaks, and voila, a pretty pothole.
“We’ve already had about 17 of those cycles this past winter, that’s why we have such an increase in potholes over last year,” said Currie. Normally, the peak time for freeze-thaw cycles starts in late February and extends to the beginning of May (a.k.a. pothole spawning season).
But this winter we’ve been in juicy freeze-thaw mode since mid-December.
Because the city knew a bumper crop was coming, it increased the number of crews on daily pothole repair duty to 30 or 40 from last year’s norm of about 15. A crew is made up of two or three workers.
The repair process is not complex.
“We do our best to sweep out any debris from the hole, then fill it in with hot asphalt, tamp it, then move on to the next one,” Currie said. Forty crews can usually fix about 2,500 potholes a day, which works out to about $25 per repair.
So far, the city has already spent about $1 million to repair those 75,000 holes in 2009, and figures it spent $6.9 million to attend to those 277,000 holes that showed up in 2008.
If holes get really big, workers have to square it off, fill it in, and roll it.
“That’s why we really want to hear from the public,” Currie said. “Because our obvious preference is to get to these potholes when they’re smaller.”
The city has its own pothole patrollers, but encourages citizens to call the pothole hot line: 416-599-9090, plus # symbol, plus 164.
I’ve reported my crater. But because there isn’t a witness protection program for potholes informants, I did it anonymously. We live in the neighborhood. I don’t want trouble.
Michael Goetz has been writing about cars and editing automotive publications for more than 20 years. He lives in Toronto with his family and a neglected 1967 Jaguar E-type.
