alt Hacker NewsCursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does
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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.
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."
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.
Someone in the UK did this years ago, but they painted rather cruder designs around the potholes. Naturally, the media dubbed them 'Wanksy'.
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...
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
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.
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.
A friend of mine planted a small tree in one, after many months of notifying the local council. It was fixed very quickly.
I was wondering why potholes in my city in the UK have got outlines of dicks and balls sprayed around. Maybe this is why.
In New Orleans, pot holes get dressed up and become part of the community https://neworleansmom.com/perspectives-in-parenting/confessi...
What about mosaics?
Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does. True story, plus the moment Sofia copied us a year later
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!
In Texas, you could probably paint a rainbow around it in the morning and the governor would have somebody on it that afternoon.
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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.