As surely as it is April, the weather will change once or twice even while you are reading this. Chicagoans know that spring is just a concept, not a season, and we are just as likely to have snow as we are to have warm temperatures… sometimes in t
As surely as it is April, the weather will change once or twice even while you are reading this. Chicagoans know that spring is just a concept, not a season, and we are just as likely to have snow as we are to have warm temperatures… sometimes in the same day.
Unfortunately, those weather fluctuations play havoc with our road surfaces, giving us a pothole season that seems to last six or seven months. Great, gaping holes in the asphalt or concrete roadways are hazards to all vehicles.
Budget cuts and lack of state and federal funding has left the city’s road resurfacing program way behind, and some citizens are coming up with novel ways to deal with it. A few neighbors on the West Side even went to the trouble to get their own hot asphalt and rollers and do some patching on their own. The city quickly came out to warn against that do-it-yourself roadwork, noting that the quality of the work would not match city workers and that they would not be safe working in the streets.
We are all for letting the professionals do it, but, unfortunately, the city has not been doing it. While it seemed tons of asphalt appeared overnight to repave some of the streets being shown to visitors from the International Olympic Committee, there are still streets in some neighborhoods waiting for the first pass of an asphalt truck.
While the Austin citizens who did the paving work were good natured about it, this is serious business. It is not just the cars that actually hit the potholes and wreck tires, rims, even axles. It is also the ones that swerve suddenly to miss those jagged craters, creating a different traffic hazard.
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