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Review: Paramount Room
As we read John Hilkevitch's story about potholes today, a few things caught our interest. Mostly numbers, to the shock of no one:
++ 271,000 potholes were filled last year.
++ A city foreman says in one day, they'll fill "200 to 300 [potholes] and use 11 tons of material," which means it takes roughly 88 pounds of material to fill a pothole. Does that seem like a lot? It does to us. This is apparently right on.
++ Drivers reported 1,422 potholes via 311, and those only represent about 20 percent of the potholes the City repairs.
++ The City has more than 3,800 miles of roads.
++ Hilkevitch uses the phrase "Good fortune will be needed to prevent a record outbreak of chuckholes...." Say it out loud. It's like an angel whispering sweet nothings in your ear; just reading it over and over makes our eyeballs giggle. Chuckhole. Good fortune and chuckholes. Meeehehehehe.
Giganto pothole on Chicago and Cicero by Eloise Mason
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The potholes under the bridge that connects Michigan Ave to LSD going North are unbelievable and have been that way for many years. Riding a CTA bus over- it's painful. You can see people bracing themselves before going through that minefield. And just when you think you've survived it 'BOOM' there's the biggest one yet. Some drivers are smart and go around or over them slowly but most just gun it.
Since a bag of cold patch at the local home center weighs 50 pounds and would only fill a small pothole, this number sounds right. (The picture is a pothole needing at least 15 bags, or 750 lbs., of asphalt.)
That number sounds right on. Concrete weighs about 150 pounds per cubic foot and asphalt can't be all that much different. So what this means is that an average pothole is about 18" across and 4" deep (assuming no waste product). I can definitely believe this.
potholes are one thing ... imo, the thing in the picture is one of my feared nemesi -- sinkholes! when the road starts to crumble in on itself, that's more than a pothole!!
One thing that Hilkevitch left out is that all that salt the city uses makes the potholes worse.
The melted snow flows down into the cracks & freezes & wrecks the streets. Places that don't use as much salt have better roads & less pothole.
The streetlight poles also don't rust out as much.