The joys of parking: When asphalt has fault lines
Posted on August 28th, 2008 – 6:05 AMBy Roadguy
You might remember Roadguy’s “welcome to work” pothole from a few months back. A few weeks after the post, the city filled in the hole, and the next day, I was reassigned to a new parking lot.
My new space is a bit harder to get to but closer to the front door of headquarters, so it’s been something of a wash in terms of how much time my overall home-to-desk commute takes. One thing that hasn’t changed is the quality of the pavement. Last week, this appeared in the middle of the first aisle:
Apparently the massive weight of the traffic cone is too much for the asphalt. Gives great confidence that it can hold up my car. The next time you don’t hear from me for a few days, you’ll know where to look: the Abyss of Parking Lot A.
6 Responses to "The joys of parking: When asphalt has fault lines"
The road buckles underneath a cone? Boy, I would hate to see what a feather does!
Where I work, we own a full block-sized parking lot downtown Mpls. It, too, is full of patches and fault lines and my lady friends tell me that it is a major pain to walk on in heels. But apparently there is a city ordinance that if you tear up and re-pave the entire lot there has to also be a certain amount of green space added. Can anybody confirm or refute that?
I have a hole just like that in front of my house. The problem is actually in the base beneath the pavement, not in the pavement itself. Every few years the city will patch it but it caves in again in about a week because they don’t ever fix the cause of the problem.
Roadguy, does DOT keep an “orange cone” database so they know where their cones are and a “cone” spot doesn’t get neglected and forgotten?
I hope they don’t drive around looking for blemishes holding a cone in order to fix these spots.
That’d be a neat database to keep up to date. With everything on the computer now, they’ve gotta know where their cones are. (I could see someone being mischievious with that database though) (I thought you meant this was for dairy queen cones)
Rember DOT isn’t the only group that works with pavement or that owns orange cones (I have one in my garage and I know auto groups that have hundreds of them).
I suspect that if DOT people are placing cones, that they have a work order to document what they are supposed to be doing. We may not see it but bosses like to see that jobs get finished.
Patching but never fixing the underlying cause. Isn’t that Mn Dot’s mission statement?
