Watch out, 'peak pothole' season looms

It's pothole season inthe 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 kilometresof roads across the cityto try to savewheels 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 fluctuateback and forth across the freezing point, Ottawa's roads experiencethe destructive cycleof 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 meltice 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 SandroGiaccone, 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 carowners 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'sthe squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

Along a particularly-rough section of King Edward Avenue, in the shoulder of thenorthbound lanes leading to the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge and Gatineau, Que., a graveyard of hubcaps is poking through the snow.

Ten plastic wheel coverings ejected fromcars clattering over a rough 100-metrestretch 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 apriority for renewal in this year'sbudget.

And while repaving might not be coming this year, a day after the inquiry, city crews were outpatching the road surface.

"We're waiting too long to intervene on roads," said Coun. MathieuFleury.

King Edward Avenue is in his ward, and he said he had noticed the poor condition of the roadway on ski trips to GatineauPark. Even during the pandemic, he said trafficwas steady on the roadas essential workers relied on it.

Fleury pointed to the preventative, asphalt-sealing work done by the National Capital Commission on the Sir George tienne Cartier Parkway as a road-maintenanceexample worthfollowing.

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."