I have a friend who owns a car repair / body shop here in Minnesota who is enjoying a bumper crop of business from nasty potholes this spring. The roads are in such bad shape that you can see the old bricks & streetcar tracks poking through the broken pavement (upper right photo) near his shop, even though the trolley service ended almost 70 years ago!
My son hit an especially vicious pothole that bent his wheel and caused a bad flat. It cost him $500 to get everything repaired. He’s generally pretty careful, but some roads are so torn up (photo in upper left) there is no avoiding them. I’ve taken to driving my Jeep Wrangler as much as I can since it’s ‘off-road rated’.
Perhaps we should delay paying our income tax until the potholes are fixed? 🙂
Go slow and take it easy this early spring weekend!
Images: (c) MrFireStation.com
MrFireStation 
Wow, Chief, those road beds need work! Speaking of potholes, that may be an interesting angle for those who pave the way to FIRE. Get on top of pothole repair work before bad financial winters make havoc & mayhem.
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Great idea – an analogy highlighting the small things that grow and get people off track and out of alignment!
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After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, I moved to St. Louis. They had a once in a century snowstorm. The city lacked proper equipment to clear the streets and their drivers were not acclimated to driving in the snow.
I was involved in two traffic accidents that were totally not my fault. One of them was caused by actually stopping at a Stop Sign and someone plowed into the back of my new car. The other was caused by someone who was going too fast and slid through a stop sign at an intersection and T-boned me. I also got a traffic ticket for turning left onto The Interstate onramp after waiting two traffic light cycles for a left turn arrow. I was able to get the ticket dismissed in court by explaining to the judge that I recently moved from Wisconsin and the traffic lights there would sometimes not work right in winter when it got too cold.
The only thing that sucks worse than driving in Wisconsin and Minnesota in the winter is driving in an area where the people don’t know how to drive slowly on snowy and icy roads and the local governments don’t buy proper snow removal equipment.
Back to the subject of potholes. St. Louis had sinkholes suddenly open up in the middle of streets in downtown over ancient brick lined sewage canals. People and their vehicles would fall 20 feet into a giant sinkhole AKA the world’s biggest potholes.
I have an idea, why don’t us citizens pool our resources together and pay for a service that fills in potholes so that we can avoid suffering $500 of damage or falling into a 20 foot deep abyss while driving? Oh wait a minute. Hold the horses. We are already paying, and paying dearly for such a service with our taxes and the civil serpents are not holding up their end of the bargain.
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Winter driving isn’t for the faint of heart, that’s for sure. I think it’s actually a bit easier in MN/WI, because we have the equipment for it and are less likely to get ice storms. We lived near Quincy IL when I was a kid and we had a lot more ice storms than snow storms there.
I don’t remember living anywhere that there were sinkholes, though. That’s a curious danger throughout the South. When I hear about sinkholes, my mind goes to that Corvette Museum in Bowling Green KY that lost a showroom of museum cars to a giant sinkhole. Some of those Corvettes looked like they fell 50’+.
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Those potholes came in handy. I’m recovering from a reaction to ‘red tide.’ Drank some Theraflu, took a tylenol, went out to lunch at Shish. No problem driving as there are so many potholes on Summit Ave that no one drives over 20 mph. Piece of cake driving under the influence of tylenol 🙂
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Oh no … red tide reaction! Summit Avenue has some of the worst potholes. St Paul’s nicest street is left in terrible shape.
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