No quick cure for city’s pothole plague

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This article was published 02/05/2022 (1307 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A glance from the rim of one of the gaping calderas on Osborne Street offers geological and archeological insights into Winnipeg’s pothole problem.

The unrelenting forces of erosion, compounded by the cycles of freezing and thawing and the constant pressure automobile traffic exerts on the roadway, tear up and disperse chunks of concrete and asphalt every spring, without fail.

The widening gaps in the pavement on this stretch of Osborne expose the city’s transportation past: streetcar tracks and Winnipeg’s dubitable history of building and maintaining its streets.

While everyone in the city becomes a road-construction expert during pothole season — including, for decades on end, city council members — few pay heed to the cold reality that this city, with its erratic spring weather, notorious gumbo clay soil and tightness with a buck, makes the idea of perfectly smooth roads for 12 months a year a fantasy.

Red River Valley gumbo expands greatly when it’s saturated with water, which is definitely the case in the spring of 2022, but shrinks when the weather is dry, as it was during the drought conditions of last summer.

The winter and spring of 2021-22 brought a succession of perfect storms that have left few roads in the city — or, for that matter, the vehicles that travel them — unscathed. The persistent string of Colorado lows in April — with more surely to come in May — have made repairing the roads difficult for city crews; according to Mayor Brian Bowman, “cold mix” patches wear away quickly and often must be reapplied several times.

Coun. Kevin Klein says the city can’t afford to wait for warmer weather to address the crumbling streets, and introduced a motion to fund an emergency road-repair plan, targeting routes with speed limits greater than 50 km/h. He says non-essential budget items can be cut and efficiencies can be found to pay for his plan — the sort of financial fix-all phrasing commonly found in populist talking points.

The city’s road-repair budget, not to mention the limited number of staff, trucks, tar and asphalt needed to fix the roads, cannot be expanded and contracted with the same ease with which nature continually alters the ground upon which roads are built.

Mr. Klein’s ambitious and somewhat predictable plan seems as much intended to smooth the concerns and curry the favour of voters in an election year as to offer a practical fix for the chronic problem of crumbling roadways — something the city budget, agreed upon by council, is intended to address.

Council has budgeted $165 million for road repairs in 2022, part of a six-year, $870-million program.

Some self-styled road experts like to compare the city’s roads to ones in North Dakota, Minnesota and other jurisdictions with similar weather patterns, and wonder why Winnipeg’s byways boast so many more bumps. They seem disinclined to give this city’s engineers, managers and politicians credit for studying how other locales build and repair roads and seeking better ways to make Winnipeg’s more resistant to brutal conditions. That information is undoubtedly factored into plans for local streets.

When it comes time to pay the bill for better roads, however, city council — as well as the provincial government, which largely controls the road-building purse strings — seems confined mostly to seeking cost-conscious solutions rather than investing in longer-term relief.

Which, sadly, means in the short term, at least, Winnipeg motorists must fend for themselves by slowing down and dodging potholes in order to limit damage to their vehicles. The pursuit of longer-term fixes might rightly be a front-of-mind concern when Winnipeggers go to the polls in October.