City eyes more money for potholes
The city is considering a hike in the pothole repair budget. The Journal says repair garages are overwhelmed with cars busted up with pothole damage.
We have good engineering schools in this town. The city should create a prestigious prize for the development of a better asphalt formulation so that roads don’t degrade so quickly.
steph 09:36 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
2013 – “Montrealers are fed up with the expensive and poor-quality work of suspect asphalt companies, the opposition Vision Montreal party says it’s time the city considered producing its own asphalt to repair potholes and repave streets.”
nothing came to futition. Applebaum was our mayor, everything was squeaky clean.
The poor asphalt formula is by design. Do the engineering school teach engineered obsolecense?
Kevin 10:16 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
Change the contracts so that the company that builds the road is responsible for 30 years of maintenance.
carswell 11:46 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
Echoing steph here. I can’t vouch for this personally but persons who work with technical services in nearby municipalities have told me that many of Montreal’s and, to a lesser or greater extent, Quebec’s road problems stem from corruption. A cited example was the gravel used for road beds. The construction firm will, if necessary (it isn’t always due to inspector overwork, absenteeism or incompetence), pay off the inspector and then use a lesser (read cheaper) grade of gravel and/or put down an 8.5 cm layer instead of the specified 10 cm (figures pulled from thin air) and/or improperly compact the bed before paving. This leads to premature wear, exacerbated by our freeze-thaw climate and scraping by plows, which the firms view as a good thing since it means more contracts.
It may not be simply greed, either. The low profit margins resulting from the tendering process, which typically awards the contract to the lowest “qualified” bidder, encourage contractors, especially ones facing cost overruns, to cut corners.
DeWolf 11:50 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
Many streets and roads need to be completely rebuilt. You can patch things up with as much high-quality asphalt as you want but if the foundational layers are broken, the road will continue to deteriorate until you start from scratch and rebuild the whole thing.
As for Kevin’s idea, how does it work when a third party inevitably needs to excavate the road for some reason or another? Hydro-Québec, Énergir, the CSEM, various city departments, private contractors. They break the road, dig a big hole and are responsible for patching it up again. The quality varies, but anyone can easily point the finger at someone else if the repairs don’t last.
There needs to be vastly better coordination in road repairs and better quality construction materials, but also an emphasis on reducing the amount of traffic on the roads – which means investing even more in public transit and alternative mobility.
Snow clearance practices probably also need to be reviewed because scraping ice and snow right down to the asphalt is a good way to damage the road. Some streets have granite curbs and even they are chipped and broken from years of abuse by snowplows and ice scrapers.
mare 12:33 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
What DeWolf said, and on top of that all pothole repairs are mechanically unsound. They just push a piece of asphalt in a hole, without removing weak and loose material around the periferie of the pothole. And they also never undercut the edges. If they would do that, there would be a mechanical bond, on top of the relatively weak chemical bond (new asphalt sticking to old asphalt or concrete).
Almost every patch they put in now will have fallen out by next year, with some additional surrounding material, either by normal traffic or pulled out by snow scrapers. Augmented by water infiltration and frost expansion it’s a never ending process of creating bigger and bigger potholes.
Ephraim 13:40 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
I think only Cote-St-Luc has proper pothole machinery. They actually clear it and then repave the street. It’s not simply a little patch… they get rid of the cracks and all, so it doesn’t come back.
In parts of the UK, they often include in the contract for paving a road a warranty on the road for years, so they have to repair it, if it develops potholes. And they charge them, per hour for when the road is closed. So they repair it quickly and often, if possible, at night.
Kevin 16:25 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
Notify all players that a road is being rebuilt and if they have to dig into it afterward, they will have to pay to repave the entire block, because a patch doesn’t work.
I know this was attempted with the St. Laurent or St. Denis dig, but there was a lack of willpower on the part of city officials to enforce this.
In addition, Quebec needs to make road and materials specifications based on neighbouring jurisdictions with similar climates and not whatever is done in France and Belgium and the Francophonie. This means engineers need to be able to communicate in English (horrors) in order to understand that Quebec’s specifications are decades out of date.
Thirdly, damage during thaw is proportional to weight of vehicle, so ban heavy vehicles from weak streets at certain times of year. The province also has to man weighing stations for big rigs.
dhomas 17:19 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
If we impose a guarantee of any kind, those companies will say they provide a guarantee and then “go out of business” when asked to provide warranty services. The roof on my house was guaranteed for 20 years. It started leaking within 4-5 years, but the company had gone out of business (though I see the people responsible for it are working for a differently named outfit now).
Kevin 18:20 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
Only firms with 20 years history allowed to apply even if (clutch pearls) they are from out of province. Half of payment will be held in escrow and given out as an annuity over life of street.
Sorry about your roof @dhomas. My was done last week and choosing the firm was an ordeal–and I did not go with lowest bidder.
Ephraim 19:21 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
@dhomas – I’m sure that you can include a bonded guarantee. Whereupon they pay someone via Lloyd’s to guarantee it (likely by ensuring personal guarantees and a hefty sum). Therefore essentially the city is buying an insurance policy, but allowing Lloyd’s to essentially verify and indemnify based on criteria that keeps the city out of the calculations and insures that it will be effective.