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It’s early in the day, and you’re zipping down the Grand Central Parkway. You have a long day ahead of you, lots to get done. The truck in front of you shifts slightly to the right, and at the last second, you realize why, as you try- BANG! Too late… you ran through a pothole, and now your dashboard says you’re losing air in your front tire. You need pothole damage like you need a hole in the head, yet you now have a bill for the tow to the repair shop, the new tire, and, if you’re really lucky, possible wheel realignment.
Potholes spring up like crazy after the constant freeze-and-thaw cycle of any winter assaults the cracks in the road, and the brutal winter that New York emerged from earlier this month produced a bumper crop of tire-eating craters. City officials say road crews have filled in over 80,000 potholes in the Big Apple since the year began. Natalie Migliore hit the streets in Mid-Town for 710 WOR’s Curtis Sliwa and Larry Mendte in the Morning program to see if that was really the case, as her “Beat on the Street” segment asked drivers if they’ve noticed any improvements, and which roads still look like they were paved with Swiss cheese.
One driver told Migliore to avoid the roads that cut through the heart of Central Park: “Yeah, there’s tons of potholes everywhere, especially going through Central Park every day on the bypass routes, a lot. My tires are taking a beating.”
A second driver suggested cautiously leaving “the tunnel”, though that could’ve meant just about any tunnel: “They’re pretty big, especially when you’re coming right out of the tunnel, it’s like there’s just one massive crater there that’s like, (your) tires are gone.”
Still a third driver gave an even more general idea of where you can find potholes in abundance: “If you go downtown, the streets are horrible. It’s not one pothole. It’s, like, all over the place.”
That last driver, however, did offer Migliore his “destroy the city to save it” solution to the pothole problem- just re-pave the entire street: “The way they should do it is do the whole block again. That will last a year or more, but that’s expensive. They won’t do it that way. They’ll patch it, and then the holes will get bigger and bigger, and then they’ll do it, but that doesn’t work.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images