Much has been written about the nature of Montreal winters and how the melting snow gets into the road through the cracks and then contracts and expands during alternate thaw and freeze cycles. However, the real reason that all those cracks and holes are there is because Montreal has had no road repair program for the past 40 or 50 years. Instead, road surfaces are scratched and scraped and coated with about two inches of asphalt while the underlying breaks and washouts remain unrepaired. This is about as effective as putting a new layer of plaster on top of a wall of broken plaster and the results are equally easy to foresee. It looks nice for a while but then the underlying conditions reassert themselves and the cracks and breaks quickly reappear.
Roads have limited lifespans and cannot survive forever on patching. Depending on the type of use it gets, a city road will usually need to be excavated down to the foundation and rebuilt every 15 to 30 years. Towns such as Westmount have effective programs whereby several roads are rebuilt each year and it is hardly surprising that their roads are in better condition than ours.
For Montreal, the problem started with long term mayor Jean Drapeau, who preferred to blow the budget on beautification and big prestige projects (think, Olympic Stadium roof) and neglected the day-to-day maintenance of the city.
Failure to undertake regular road rebuilding is the equivalent of the accumulation of debt and, like personal debt, the interest gets more and more onerous the longer the principal is left unpaid. Pothole repair costs represent the interest payments that we pay on our road repair debt and, as the years go by, the burden of the interest payments becomes greater and greater as we increasingly pay interest on the interest as our roads crumble faster and faster.
Much has been written about better ways to fill potholes but none of the pundits seem concerned with actually eliminating them. However, if the political will were to emerge, the elimination of potholes would be relatively easy. Simply put, potholes need to be cut open and excavated to a depth of four or five feet so that that small section (usually 4'x4') of street can be rebuilt with gravel, concrete and asphalt. Potholes eliminated in this manner will not return and this method is already used on our highways where speed and traffic volume issues leave no choice whatsoever. In the city, however, our politicians do see a choice since it is usually car suspensions and not lives that are put at risk. And besides, just to be careful, they have convinced the provincial legislature to enact laws protecting the city from pothole- related claims. The operation would probably take two or three years to complete and could be funded by stopping our current ridiculous folly of spending more than $100 million each year to scratch road surfaces and apply asphalt mascara. Then, once all the potholes were eliminated we could start a serious 10-to-30 year program of rebuilding all of our roads without the financial drain and workforce distraction of filling and refilling unnecessary potholes. Naturally, there would still be new potholes each year but their numbers would be dramatically reduced. Repairing and rebuilding our roads would provide a major boost to civic pride and help to get us out of the doldrums into which our once proud city has sunken. The solutions are there; we just have to apply them and to do that we simply need representatives with both vision and political courage.
However, potholes are a mayor's best friend. Did you ever wonder why the politicians continue to let things slide and to allow the same potholes to come back year after year? The answer is simply that they want it that way because they want to be able to issue endless contracts to generate election fund gratitude from grateful contract recipients.
In the old days, before universal adult voting suffrage, prime ministers maintained power partly through the issuing of patronage appointments and sinecure positions in order to create supporters who could be counted on through thick and thin. Today, in Montreal, patronage and sinecure (sometimes defined as "a job for the mayor's brother") has been largely replaced with the issuing of a confetti storm of large and small contracts that encourage individual company owners to make legal personal contributions to the party in power. Where did you think they get the millions of dollars that they spend during election campaigns?
Recently, we have been hearing how the City of Montreal is planning to spend about 10 million of your tax dollars this year to throw asphalt into something in the region of 40,000 potholes. Some of the work will be done by city employees but there will still have to be major contracts issued to buy the mountains of asphalt involved and much of the work itself will be done by private companies.
If you do the math you will see that $10 million for 40,000 potholes works out to about $250 to fill each of them. While $250 to fill a pothole, often with just a shovel full of asphalt, seems like a lot of money, the price has to be high in order to leave a sufficient margin for generous and multiple contributions to political party election funds. Plus, the payments have to be excessive enough to allow for contributions to more than one party since contractors like to do this in order to protect themselves against potential changes of administration at city hall. If, however, the roads were properly maintained and repaired there would be drastic reductions both in the numbers of future contracts issued and in the subsequent volume of party political contributions. If you would like your politicians to change their policies, call them up and let them know.
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