Watch out, 'peak pothole' season looms
Auto repair shop says city still about 2 weeks away from 'peak pothole' season
It's pothole season in the city, and for municipal road maintenance crews, March Madness is about rims — but not basketball rims.
They will spend this month patching and levelling 6,000 kilometres of roads across the city to try to save wheels from destruction.
March is easily their busiest month.
Last March, crews received 1,273 requests to fill potholes. By April, the next busiest month in the calendar, requests had fallen to 762.
"This time of year is typically the worst for road conditions," explained a City of Ottawa spokesperson in an email.
Auto shop preps for spring flood of repairs
As spring arrives and temperatures fluctuate back and forth across the freezing point, Ottawa's roads experience the destructive cycle of expansion and contraction of brittle, frozen asphalt. The city sees about 80 freeze-thaw cycles a year, per a five-year average.
Meanwhile, more powerful rays of sunshine melt ice that has, for weeks, concealed cavities in the road.
Early this month, those cavities began showing up everywhere, but one local wheel-alignment veteran said "peak pothole" is still about two weeks away.
"There's a lot of damage a pothole can do," said Sandro Giaccone, manager at Frisby Tire, where they are preparing for an avalanche of alignment work.
Bent or broken rims, blown tires, ball joints, stabilizer links, struts, springs, wheel bearings, and control arm bushings are all vulnerable, he said.
Suspension repairs, which can easily blow past the $1,500 mark, are often discovered by car owners later in spring, when winter tires are swapped for summers, Giaconne said.
"I say to everybody, just keep your distance from the guy in front of you and assume every puddle has a pothole in it."
Pedestrians also have pothole problem
But potholes can be dangerous to pedestrians, too, as Ryan Lovie discovered this week.
Tuesday night, the Old Ottawa South resident, who uses canes to help him walk, returned to his building near Grove and Bank streets in the darkness and lost his footing in a roadway crater.
"Took a face plant right in the middle of the street," he recounted. "It's the footing, it's ice, it's a combination of Ottawa winter weather — it's brutal," he said.
When it comes to which potholes get fixed, there's evidence that it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.
Along a particularly-rough section of King Edward Avenue, in the shoulder of the northbound lanes leading to the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge and Gatineau, Que., a graveyard of hubcaps is poking through the snow.
Ten plastic wheel coverings ejected from cars clattering over a rough 100-metre stretch of broken asphalt are scattered on the roadside.
CBC News inquired about the condition of King Edward Avenue, last repaved in 2010, but the city said the road was not identified as a priority for renewal in this year's budget.
And while repaving might not be coming this year, a day after the inquiry, city crews were out patching the road surface.
"We're waiting too long to intervene on roads," said Coun. Mathieu Fleury.
King Edward Avenue is in his ward, and he said he had noticed the poor condition of the roadway on ski trips to Gatineau Park. Even during the pandemic, he said traffic was steady on the road as essential workers relied on it.
Fleury pointed to the preventative, asphalt-sealing work done by the National Capital Commission on the Sir George Étienne Cartier Parkway as a road-maintenance example worth following.
Others, like Old Ottawa South resident Joanne Steventon, simply try to see the positive in pothole season and the "human-sized" hole outside her home.
"It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but it actually slows traffic down," she said.
"Don't hate me, but I'm not complaining about it."