2008-09-29

Road Works

One of the things I was pleasantly surprised by after the election was that road works continued to take place. Our roads were in danger of falling apart; cracks and potholes were all over the place and commuting was a bit of an adventure in many places.

However, Works and Engineering continued to repave several key roads over the past few months, including North Shore in Flatts, Middle Road near Paget Lights and Middle Road near Amaral's.

I'm a bit concerned that perhaps the fix won't hold up, as after rain and wind from Tropical Kyle passed through over the weekend, a visible pothole appeared in the road near Paget Lights. I don't know if the material laid down wasn't strong enough, it wasn't allowed to harden enough or we simply have too many large vehicles tearing up the roads in the first place. But it's not a good sign that road laid down less than six months ago is already falling apart.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't imagine that it would too many vehicles on the road. MY guess would be either due to shoddy workmanship, or due to the quality of materials used.

I only say this because, in Toronto, the busiest highway (the 401), the most busiest highway in North America (if you can believe it), has it's fair share of traffic - and this road only ever falls apart post winter when the severe cold causes cracks and potholes. Otherwise that road holds up fine...

Anonymous said...

It depends as well what's underneath the road.

Most of Canada's major roads have the luxury of being built relatively recently with solid foundations... Bermuda's roads are hundreds of years old and have foundations made of soft limestone riddled with caves and with tree roots growing underneath them.

Still, how cynical is Tryangle? Shouldn't we expect that W&E would do their job after an election?

Tryangle said...

Thanks for the comments. I don't know what goes into constructing a road, and would imagine that the techniques would vary from region to region depending on climate, underlying ground, and so forth. I'm just wondering if the powers that be have skimped on materials to get the road laid more quickly and or cheaply.

Yeah, I was quite cynical particularly as we had gone a long stretch without any road work getting done (unless you count Belco and others digging up the place and patching it up with Play-Doh or something), then a month before elections stuff happened in earnest :-)