Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does
- I 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.
- My 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.
- > 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.
by ethersteeds
0 subcomment
- > 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.
- Someone in the UK did this years ago, but they painted rather cruder designs around the potholes. Naturally, the media dubbed them 'Wanksy'.
- Or, 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
- Alright, 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.
- I 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.
- In 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."
- A friend of mine planted a small tree in one, after many months of notifying the local council. It was fixed very quickly.
by JKCalhoun
3 subcomments
- I 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.
- From 2015 in the UK:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-01/an-interv...
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/articles/cvg3q1p6502o
- Motorcyclists 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...
- I was wondering why potholes in my city in the UK have got outlines of dicks and balls sprayed around. Maybe this is why.
by pikrzyszto
0 subcomment
- It'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?
- Is It Against the Law for Citizens to Fix Potholes?[2023]
https://www.wweek.com/news/dr-know/2023/04/29/is-it-against-...
- Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does. True story, plus the moment Sofia copied us a year later
by alexpotato
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- This 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_ma...
EDIT: Realized I meant the video below but both are great: https://www.ted.com/talks/janette_sadik_khan_new_york_s_stre...
by comrade1234
0 subcomment
- Here 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...
by lazycouchpotato
1 subcomments
- What about mosaics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Pothole_Bandit
by dmitri1981
0 subcomment
- In New Orleans, pot holes get dressed up and become part of the community https://neworleansmom.com/perspectives-in-parenting/confessi...
- This 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.
by lenerdenator
0 subcomment
- I 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.
- The squeaky wheel gets the grease!
by warumdarum
0 subcomment
- There is a goatse stencil, just saying
by kylemaxwell
1 subcomments
- In Texas, you could probably paint a rainbow around it in the morning and the governor would have somebody on it that afternoon.
/s
- [dead]
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