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Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

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Re: Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

#41

Post by zdragnar »

0xffff2 wrote: post #32
Perz1val wrote: post #26

Does anyone know what is a post oil industry asphalt strategy? Do we have stockpiles till the end of time already?

Does anyone expect there will be a post oil industry? I would assume (with not particular knowledge on the subject mind) that once we wind down oil use for fuel and to some extent plastics, there will be enough oil in the ground to support enough extraction for asphalt and other currently trivial uses indefinitely.

An asphalt roofing shingle company just closed in Minneapolis due to the city's new CO2 tax. The local environmental group held a little press conference crowing about it.

Mind you, this won't change the demand for asphalt shingles, they'll just be shipped from further, generating more C02 on the whole.

The only other current alternatives are all non-renewable as well- mined clay, slate, or metal. For residential roofs, I'm hoping metal continues to come down in price, as they tend to last longer and can be made to look quite good. For commercial / flat roofed buildings, there still needs to be some very thick rubberized underlayment below gravel or whatever to prevent standing water from getting in. The same is true for sod roofs in hobbit style earth homes.

So, yeah, there's still people in power who expect that all petroleum based products are equally evil and must be punished.

Re: Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

#42

Post by tgbugs »

I wonder if there are existing data sources that could be used to implement an optimal pot hole patching priority lists at scale.

Identify pot hole locations. Combine with traffic metrics for those locations. Then use a combination of some pot hole nuisance metric (size, depth, location in lane, number of cars that could hit it per unit time based on traffic metrics), a cost to repair for a given repair type metric (should include traffic disruption cost estimates), then have an estimate for future degradation if it is not repaired and the cost of that applied at a few time points .... I'm sure there are plenty of implementations of various versions of the algorithm, but I wonder whether there are open data sources ....

A quick search suggests that most approaches are municipality based crowd sourcing efforts. A stream from the radars from various vehicles could provide something that was up-to-date enough to avoid false positives that had already been fixed .... Things like streetview and various aerial photography datasets probably update too slowly ... though I know of some potholes that have existed through multiple recaptures.

0. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10636488 1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2023.103335

I guess the days of citizens grabbing their shovels and going to fix the roads are becoming a thing of the past. Which is a shame because the total cost of asphalt needed to fix most potholes is less than the cost of a single tire repair.

Re: Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

#43

Post by bigbuppo »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #33
bigbuppo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

#44

Post by washadjeffmad »

ultrarunner wrote: post #39
idiotsecant wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

#45

Post by dripdry45 »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #33
bigbuppo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

‘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…

Re: Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

#46

Post by idiotsecant »

ultrarunner wrote: post #39
idiotsecant wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 ... 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.

Re: Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

#47

Post by milkytron »

Perz1val wrote: post #26

Does anyone know what is a post oil industry asphalt strategy? Do we have stockpiles till the end of time already?

I don't think there will be a post oil industry, at least not as long as we have roads and cars.

We don't really need as much oil for walking paths, trains, or bike trails, and potholes are a different problem with different solutions for those.

As long as we have cars as we know them, we'll have oil. Road construction require s oil, all of the plastics in cars require oil, trucks require oil, shipping vessels require oil, it's oil all the way down.

It would require a seismic shift in life as we know it to live in a post oil world. Our stockpiles are pretty low (maybe a month in the US).

Re: Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

#48

Post by quickthrowman »

The weather is hell on roads in Minnesota, repeated thaw/freeze cycles really do a number on asphalt pavement. My municipality actually owns and operates an asphalt batch plant, that’s how much time and money is spent on repairing roads here in Saint Paul.

https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/public-works/street-maint...

These are just band-aids, the subsurface is usually the problem and it’s expensive to rip up and replace an entire road vs repeated mill and overlay cycles.

Re: Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

#49

Post by quickthrowman »

observationist wrote: post #18
simlevesque wrote: post #14

The root of the problem (literally) is that when potholes appear it's mostly because what's under became too porous and humid so what's over it separates easily. Patching the hole isn't a good fix but the alternative is closing roads which wrecks the economy. The other problem is that the public always asks: "why isn't it patched ?" and if you don't do it you look like you're not competent enough to be in charge. And…

And when you go to your local government, demand a fix, they'll contract a union shop to do the work, often mandated by law, and they will advocate for the least durable, most expensive fix, so as to ensure recurring work happens at a maximum frequency. Attention to certain roads, duration of work is often politicized - someone with good friends gets quick, top tier fixes, but someone who annoys the local council mig…

It depends entirely on where you live. My city has its own asphalt batch plant and they spend a few weeks every late winter/early spring repairing potholes.

Also, union labor is not mandatory for public work, but the prevailing wage scales that contractors are required to pay their workers do line up pretty closely to the actual union wages. It’s a good thing that people get paid a living wage, in my opinion. There are a lot of facilities that require union labor for certain trades due to the risk involved: mechanical, electrical, and plumbing for the most part.

Re: Procedures for Repair of Potholes in Asphalt-Surfaced Pavements

#50

Post by quietsegfault »

reaperducer wrote: post #37
pstuart wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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