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Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does
- bogomil 5mo agoCursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does. True story, plus the moment Sofia copied us a year later
- scrumper 5mo agoAlright, it's worth a try. I'll do it at night in a balaclava though, because I live in the USA and no matter whether it's local, state, or federal government they'd rather spend $100k prosecuting this than $1k fixing the hole.
- bogomil 5mo agoAh, we did it in plan sight, but I guess in the US is different. I head about people arrested while truing to fix the pothole themselves, but not for painting it, yet.
- kleiba2 5mo ago> but not for painting it, yet https://cbsaustin.com/news/offbeat/greater-cincinnati-man-charged-spray-painting-potholes-get-them-filled-faster-criminal-mischief-lockland-ohio-paint-painted-damages-cars-traffic-vehicles-firefighter-gregory-strole-costing-taxpayers-money-costs-repairs https://cbsaustin.com/news/offbeat/greater-cincinnati-man-ch...
- lenerdenator 5mo agoDo we know the outcome of the case?
- prophesi 5mo agoThankfully the case was taken to the Hamilton County Municipal Court, which I imagine was a much fairer trail than he would've received at Lockland's Mayor Court. He was cleared of all charges[0]. [0] https://local12.com/news/local/man-cleared-charges-spray-painting-potholes-cincinnati-community-lockland-gregory-strole-criminal-mischief-pothole-car-traffic-vehicle-damages-fixing-alert-drivers-roads https://local12.com/news/local/man-cleared-charges-spray-pai...
- cucumber3732842 5mo ago>He was cleared of all charges[0]. At what cost? The process is the punishment.
- bogomil 5mo agoif you can send some pictures later, on the page there is a anonymous way to send us stuff
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mxuribe 5mo agoSadly, @scrumper is 100% correct! In many, many areas and gov-levels of the U.S., the incentives have become so perverse that a municipality will spend 10x or 100x to prosecute people instead of spending 1x to fix things in the first place. Some areas are even worse, because they'll use the event (e.g. "we have rampant crime now that criminals are spray-painting and ruining our potholes!")...as an excuse to then drastically increase funding for law enforcement agencies! Its bonkers and sad all around!
- kleiba2 5mo agoOr, if you're Arnie, you give the city three weeks to fix a pot hole and then just go out and fix it yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veCUOwd8Ye0&t=73s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veCUOwd8Ye0&t=73s
- cromulent 5mo agoA friend of mine planted a small tree in one, after many months of notifying the local council. It was fixed very quickly.
- lenerdenator 5mo agoI find that potholes in my area generally get fixed, but it may take a while for them to get around to it. Furthermore, if it's a major divot on an interstate, you have to do more than just pothole repair: you have to scrape it down and completely re-pave the entire area. One thing I've noticed in my travels is that it's rather difficult to have a pothole on a train track.
- Simulacra 5mo agoThe squeaky wheel gets the grease!
- cjs_ac 5mo agoSomeone in the UK did this years ago, but they painted rather cruder designs around the potholes. Naturally, the media dubbed them 'Wanksy'.
- kjs3 5mo agoThis was exactly what I thought of when I read the headline. Very amusing at the time, and it somewhat unsurprisingly was effective. I lack your laudable sense of decorum, so I'll post the link... https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/street-artist-wanksy-spray-paints-penises-around-potholes-to-get-them-filled-1.3055612 https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/street-artist-wanksy-spray-... There have been copycats... https://www.vice.com/en/article/guy-paint-penis-potholes-new-zealand/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/guy-paint-penis-potholes-new...
- atmavatar 5mo agoThat seems like a huge missed opportunity to draw the goatse guy.
- kjs3 5mo agoAgreed. In less...anatomical...inspiration, there's a guy in Chicago who took this idea straight to the fine art phase: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/11/pothole-artist-jim-bachor-mosaic/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/11/pothole-...
- BuildTheRobots 5mo agoThere's also a gent in Horsham who's recently been planting flowers in potholes to draw attention to them. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mgjklmzwvo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mgjklmzwvo
- JKCalhoun 5mo agoI still want an iPhone app that uses the accelerometers to "geotag" bumps in the road. You'd think a low-pass filter of a collective database of this data would quickly draw attention to the legit "bumps in the road"… And you would think a city municipality could use this data (within a geofence, sorted by "popularity" and Newtons) to determine which potholes to tackle.
- lenerdenator 5mo agoThat's a good idea. Seriously. I think with a decent LLM tool you could get a POC going pretty quickly, and Code for America [0] is a pretty good resource for interfacing with governments on projects like that. [0] https://codeforamerica.org/ https://codeforamerica.org/
- JKCalhoun 5mo agoI could knock it out—it's adoption that is the issue. It's only useful at scale. As someone else pointed out, Waymo (or Waze, or Google Maps, or Apple Maps) ought to adopt this as an opt-in feature. You would get rich pot-hole data fast.
- xnx 5mo agoWaymo would be smart to offer this service to municipalities, especially those with supposed concerns about "safety".
- sss111 5mo agomy bmw already does this somehow, always gives me a "rough road ahead" warning. I wonder if they use accelerometers
- ikesau 5mo agoMy model of municipal maintenance is that a city's road maintenance workers have a long list of known potholes to fix which is triaged with some formula and dealt with day-by-day. Spraypainting the pothole distorts the triage process and makes a pothole jump the queue, putting it ahead of more severe or older issues than it otherwise would have been. It might not be zero sum, if it causes the agency to act with more haste to avoid embarrassment, but it seems like it could be close? Plus it probably takes more resources to clean up the spraypaint afterwards. Most road maintenance crews probably aren't sitting around with abundant materials and machinery neglecting their duties, so I guess I just have some questions about what the real cost of this tactic is. What's giving.
- peddling-brink 5mo agoI don’t imagine all government work has been perfectly prioritized on a well calibrated sliding scale.
- adampunk 5mo agoCitizens should have a say in how municipalities order work. If they're not given that say through less-disruptive means, then they can choose to harmlessly tag places where maintenance is failing. Why are we excusing civic inaction because it might cause an unexpected schedule change for road crews? Why am I supposed to be so full of concern for the ease of their schedule that I'm ok with broken streets? In short, c'mon, man.
- kjs3 5mo agoThis is just a dressed up way of saying "I don't care how the road crews work or who else they might be helping, I want them working on the problem I care about". You don't know if the crews are working on bigger problems (or bigger potholes), or they're working in a neighborhood you don't drive through and thus don't care about...if they aren't patching up your annoyance right now, then screw 'em, they suck at their job. I've gone to our municipal planning meetings for these types of things, and there is always at least one person there with this sense of entitlement. They want to talk about "excusing civic inaction" or similar just like you, but when shown "this is what the crews are working on", the retort is "yeah, but that's not the pothole on my street" (with the usually unsaid "...so why should I give a phuk about those people"). These people usually show up at other meetings to complain about having to pay taxes to pay for those repairs. But that's another little joy of local politics...
- pipes 5mo agoI was wondering why potholes in my city in the UK have got outlines of dicks and balls sprayed around. Maybe this is why.
- dacops 5mo agoI look around and see work that needs doing all the time. Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment. What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs... it's a world where work is not focused on satisfying our needs but rather focused on maximizing profit. As long as we're choosing to make work about making someone else wealthy rather than satisfying all our needs, we'll never have enough jobs to get the work done. Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care.
- vlovich123 5mo agoOr we’ve invested far too much money in building a road network and the economic value from it either isn’t captured to sustain it OR it’s insufficient to cover costs and it’s being subsidized. Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine. Pretending like capitalism is the thing that creates economic tradeoffs is incorrect and it’s just scapegoating capitalism - of course every economic system will have problems, but potholes are not uniquely a capitalism problem but more a problem of maintenance after huge capital investments for building infrastructure - maintenance is always harder and a debt that previous generations saddled us by building said infrastructure and that’s true whatever economic model you follow. China will have a similar problem in ~100-200 years as the cost to maintain all the roads, power plants, and buildings start to become a reality.
- smallmancontrov 5mo agoIt's funny how the "hard choices" fingerwagging never comes out to scold the parts of the economy where rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are, and it's such a dogmatic article of faith that the gross excess over there couldn't possibly have anything to do with the deprivation over here.
- harpiaharpyja 5mo agoEqually dogmatic take. A lot of scarcity is artificial.
- breve 5mo agoFrom 2015 in the UK: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-01/an-interview-with-english-graffiti-artist-wanksy-penis-doodler-and-pothole-avenger https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-01/an-interv... https://themanc.com/art-and-culture/manchester-graffiti-artist-wanksy-penis-drawings-potholes/ https://themanc.com/art-and-culture/manchester-graffiti-arti... Other UK examples: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tees-48068866 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tees-48068866 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3q1p6502o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3q1p6502o
- gampleman 5mo agoI don't know if it will help fixing it, but it might help drivers avoid them more easily if they're painted in bright colors, which still sounds like a plus. Nobody wants to drive into a massive pothole at full speed unaware or try to dangerously dodge at the last moment.
- dmitri1981 5mo agoIn New Orleans, pot holes get dressed up and become part of the community https://neworleansmom.com/perspectives-in-parenting/confession-why-im-sad-our-neighborhood-pothole-got-filled/ https://neworleansmom.com/perspectives-in-parenting/confessi...
- aaron695 5mo ago[dead]
- lazycouchpotato 5mo agoWhat about mosaics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Pothole_Bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Pothole_Bandit
- dole 5mo agoPortland Anarchist Road Care took it to an effective extreme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Anarchist_Road_Care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Anarchist_Road_Care
- kylemaxwell 5mo agoIn Texas, you could probably paint a rainbow around it in the morning and the governor would have somebody on it that afternoon. /s
- mxuribe 5mo agoWhat you stated is so sad but true, because i could see that happening, and not just in Texas. :-(
- david927 5mo agoIn 1961, Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, read a newspaper story about two Portuguese students who went to jail for making a toast to freedom. He wrote letters to the Portuguese government and got others to do so as well, and it got media attention, and they were freed. That was the start of Amnesty International, which to this day, simply asks people to write a letter when they see an injustice. The spray painting potholes story has the same theme: "Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness."
- alexpotato 5mo agoThis TED talk from a former NYC official about small changes leading to big impact on city life is great: https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_burden_how_public_spaces_make_cities_work https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_burden_how_public_spaces_ma... EDIT: Realized I meant the video below but both are great: https://www.ted.com/talks/janette_sadik_khan_new_york_s_streets_not_so_mean_any_more https://www.ted.com/talks/janette_sadik_khan_new_york_s_stre...
- ofrzeta 5mo agoThis is what the Deutsche Bahn does on their train platforms as well. I thought it was one cohort that marks the damage and then comes another and fixes them. But true to Deutsche Bahn they just leave it as that. Now I understand that this can be considered fixing it.
- comrade1234 5mo agoHere in Zurich there's a city office where you can report graffiti that's on city property and they eventually will fix it but they have a big backlog. I learned though that if it's obscene graffiti they move it to the top of the list - there was a typical FCZ (football club Zurich) on a wall near where I live for months then one night someone spray-painted a big penis over it and the graffiti was fixed in just a couple of days later...
- warumdarum 5mo agoThere is a goatse stencil, just saying
- pikrzyszto 5mo agoIt's interesting to see lack of tolerance towards potholes - the government has a lot of other issues to work on (healthcare, education, pollution) yet potholes, being a problem we are affected by daily seem more important to people than the "remote" problems caused by underfunding in other areas. Even if this trick works, would it be ethical, knowing it draws money away from other areas? What would be the road SLO we would agree be acceptable?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- rolph 5mo agoIs It Against the Law for Citizens to Fix Potholes?[2023] https://www.wweek.com/news/dr-know/2023/04/29/is-it-against-the-law-for-citizens-to-fix-potholes/ https://www.wweek.com/news/dr-know/2023/04/29/is-it-against-...
- M95D 5mo agoMotorcyclists in Romania had a campaign a few years ago. They spray-painted a body outline near potholes, as if they were crime scenes / fatal accident sites. https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/social/groapa-ucide-o-campanie-care-trage-un-semnal-de-alarma.html https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/social/groapa-ucide-o-campanie...
- ethersteeds 5mo ago> A few neighbours who told us “nothing will change” went quiet. A few said “OK, but this was a fluke.” Are they wrong? This is the equivalent of getting customer support from an otherwise unreachable tech company because your story went viral. It's the exception that proves the rule, not the status quo. Undeniably it's a good reminder of the power of publicity for accountability, but at some point the news media won't be interested in airing another "neighbors taking action" human interest story.
- sshine 5mo ago> A pothole on a road is a pothole on a road. But a pothole sprayed bright, photographed, shared, and laughed at, is something else. It is a small proof that the citizen and the system are not as far apart as we like to think. Next to where I live there is a sign to caution drivers because of kids playing. The sign was very worn to the point that it’s just white from the distance of a driver. So I repainted it with an ink pen, making the kid’s head into a balloon. It draws a lot of attention now. I think the speed bumps in the road probably do more for the safety, but the sign does more for laughs.
- _spduchamp 5mo agoHere is a really inspiring book that touches on this sort of citizen led activism and democratic change. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/533225/teardown-by-dave-meslin/9780143197058 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/533225/teardown-by-d... It was also turned into a short documentary series. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgBne2KTlDUzDQasv65PtT9LqBEJSkQIs https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgBne2KTlDUzDQasv65PtT9Lq...
- rythmshifter 5mo agoFlock anyone?