There are a number of sure signs of spring.
From the welcome sight of the first robin, all covered in bits of ice and muddy water and warbling more than usual on account of it is shivering uncontrollably in the chilly unseasonable temperatures, to the lovely little crocuses in the fields outside of the city, poking out their little frozen purple heads, looking around and wondering what all this white stuff is and why they seem to be floating in vast ponds of melting ice water.
But these days the sure sign of spring is surely what we find after the street lakes and plugged corner drain dams have finally dried up enough for relatively dry passage on our roadways. In a word: potholes.
Suddenly springtime turns into a crazy Pothole Demolition Derby — a vehicle obstacle course featuring busy roadways dangerously packed with erratically swerving cars and trucks as commuters attempt to commute between the holes and the cracks and the crannies in the asphalt.
It looks like some sort of seasonal competitive car slalom event out there on the bumpy streets these days, where the first prize is arriving at your destination without structural damage to your car and all your tires still fully inflated.
But just why do potholes attack our roads and upstage the robins and crocuses that are trying so hard to make us feel good about the snow-moldy season of messy melting?
Well, according to the U.S. Federal Highway Authority’s Distress Identification Manual for Long-Term Pavement Performance (which is a real government agency down south and an actual detailed document that surprisingly doesn’t seem to be copied by our own Canadian bureaucratic Departments of Useless Information), pothole formation is “always associated with asphalt fatigue damage.”
In other words, this insightful and no doubt expensive discovery concluded that our roads are tired. And around here, our roads are really tired. They are really tired from our long winter of ping-ponging temperatures that would bounce from brutal to balmy and back again, soaking water into the every crevice of every road and then freezing it until the tired roads, like the tired citizens who drive on them, begin to crack.
The special pothole manual also includes several detailed pages defining exactly what a pothole is. All they had to do was ask Alberta drivers, any of whom could tell them in an instant and with first-hand experience that it’s “a hole in the road.”
This would have saved enough of the dollars that were spent on experts, consultants, researchers and bureaucrats to actually repair these heavily studied holes in the road.
Here in our fair city, crews are out there on Pothole Patrol, filling and packing the pock marks almost as fast as the asphalt fatigue can create new ones. It’s a bit of the old “one step forward, two steps back” — one pothole filled, two more formed.
So we swerving drivers will actually have to be patient and alert at the wheel for a while, as springtime robins and crocuses eventually replace the annual Pothole Derby as the true harbinger of the pre-summer meltdown we call spring.
But things can always be worse. The City of Edmonton, for example, estimates that this spring has revealed an estimated pothole count of nearly a half a million. And it’s not very much fun to drive in the capital city in the first place.
And then there’s the phenomenon where tired potholes get so exhausted that they collapse into something called sinkholes.
Sinkholes are simply potholes on steroids and they can swallow entire cars. In fact, we’ve already had a couple of those on our city streets although, fortunately, no cars or people were gobbled up.
Potholes? Sinkholes? The annual springtime Demolition Derby? Give me robins and crocuses any day.
Harley Hay is a local freelance writer, author, filmmaker and musician. His column appears on Saturdays in the Advocate.