It's a good season for dentists: The number of people who've chipped teeth or dislodged a crown soars around this time of the year, as we speed over potholes and find the upper and lower jaws smacking together with considerable force. I hit a pothole so deep I expected an oxygen mask to drop from the ceiling of the car. There's one enormous crevasse in our neighborhood that stretches from curb to curb, as though a fault line had shifted. People who don't know it's there hit it at 30 mph, and you can hear their necks crack; enterprising children have already set up a CHIROPRACTORY AND LEMONADE stand on the corner.
It's always bad in the spring -- this is spring, right? -- but Crosstown construction meant half a decade of enormous trucks have thundered up and down the street, making washboard roads so jarring even the people on the radio sound like someone's giving them a karate-chop massage. It's the worst year ever!
Except for last year and possibly next year. We always think it's the worst. We always demand that they FIX IT NOW. They will: eight teams, twice the usual number, will be filling potholes with "hot asphalt," the stinky stuff that smells like someone's cooking wet yaks in burned coffee. What else is there, you ask? Concrete. You probably have no idea this is an issue, but concrete makers want us to stop using asphalt. They even have a website called think-harder.org. They're quite serious. Says the site:
It's time to add our voice. It's time to share the facts. It's time to think harder.
OK then. I will sit here in the posture of Rodin's "The Thinker" -- wearing clothes as a concession to today's "politically correct" office environment; honestly, when I got into newspapers everyone smoked and clothing was optional, and thought as hard as humanly possible. The website gives you things to cogitate upon: Concrete doesn't get potholes and doesn't use oil. That's right: when you resurface with asphalt, you're giving money to countries who don't have our best interests at heart, like Canada. They hate us for taking William Shatner away from them. The site has another great slogan: "It's Not Your Fault. It's Asphalt," which does a nice job of subliminally defaming their enemy. From now on you will think of the stuff as "Rear-end Culpability."
Of course, asphalt is not taking this lying down. The Asphalt Pavement Alliance -- there is such a thing, of course, and I've no doubt there are many splinter groups, including the Justice League of Asphalt, and the People's Committee for Increased Asphaltery, the Black Gunk Guild, and so on -- asserts that over 50 years, "the carbon footprints of the asphalt pavement were found to be less than 30 percent of equivalent Portland cement concrete pavements." To say nothing of the human footprint, left by some yahoo who walked in the stuff before it cooled. The Asphalt Institute says that 94 percent of the roads in the country are paved with asphalt, so you can see why we just patch instead of rip 'em up and put in ceee-ment paths, as Jed Clampett might call them.
Who's right? I don't know. I do know that patching is expensive, and the city of Minneapolis is spending money that could be used on roads on modern new whizbang parking meters instead. A new batch will be installed down in the next few weeks. Yes, the old coin-operated models are being replaced by units that take credit cards, send you tweets when the meter's almost up, friend you on Facebook, and will eventually be controlled by Bulgarian hackers who steal your credit card numbers and send you lurid e-mails inviting you to visit naughtyparkingmeters.com. I almost wish they'd install them by gaping potholes and let citizens swipe a special card that specifically allocates portions of our property taxes directly to the repair of this particular pothole. Better yet, it would dispense a bucket of patch-sauce you could pour directly into the pothole, solving the problem.
You say, great idea! Practical, too! But asphalt or concrete? I don't care. Swirl them together and put sprinkles on top for all I care. Just fix it.
