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Pothole quickfix kit

 Fix that dang pothole yourself!
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Cities are sometimes lax about potholes. If you drive to work, often you encounter the same pothole, over and over. You learn its ways. You swerve to avoid it without even thinking. All this while waiting for your city to come patch it up. This is like having your dog take a dump in your living room and just learning to walk around it because your kids should clean it up. This fatalistic attitude is self defeating. If it is in your way, you should deal with it yourself!

I propose a pothole quickfix kit. Cities fix potholes on the cheap because they have a lot of them. Chances are that there are only a few potholes that provoke an individual consumer to rage, and thus the privately purchased kit can be costlier. Also, it has to work lightning fast, so you can fix the pothole in a few seconds, in the middle of traffic, without leaving your car.

I envision a canister which could be stored indefinitely in the car. By deploying a switch, two liquid polymers are mixed within the canister. Opening the canister reveals a plastic bag of liquid. After deploying the switch, the bag is lifted out and placed in the pothole, where it flows to conform. The liquid then sets within a few seconds. Possibly it could be sunlight activated, or it might set regardless 5 seconds after deploying. The next driver will drive over a small resilient polymer lump instead of losing a hubcap to a pothole.

—bungston, Apr 18 2003

Pothole killed a mom http://www.msnbc.ms...45/ns/us_news-life/
heartbreaking tale [bungston, Dec 23 2010]

Toynbee Tiles http://en.wikipedia.../wiki/Toynbee_tiles
If the road must be repaired secretly, maybe with something like these. [bungston, Mar 17 2011]


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Annotation:







       On a related note, the number of pothole ideas on the HB might warrant a category. I did not find this idea, though.
—bungston, Apr 18 2003
   

       No, sorry. I pay my local council to do this. That doesn't mean that they actually *do* it, of course.
There have been about twenty holes in the road outside my house for about 18 months; they were "fixed", albeit in an extremely slap-dash fashion, a couple of days ago. Local elections soon; any connection?
—angel, Apr 19 2003
   

       Going to the local council with some evidence of your exterminated pothole, you should be able to pick up a small bounty and a reload.
—lurch, Apr 19 2003
   

       <Freud>You hav you been fillingk your "pothole" yourselvf a longk time, nicht?</F>
—FarmerJohn, Apr 19 2003
   

       Sometimes a pothole is just a pothole. But I guarantee that if there were potholes right outside my house, I would do a job on them they would not soon forget.
—bungston, Apr 19 2003
   

       Somebody call the council quick. We don't want to see bung banging potholes.
—roby, Apr 20 2003
   

       Potholes. I hate them more than I did in 2003. I hear that in Britain they are going to try do-it-yourself governement, with people pitching in to fix potholes and the like. People could take credit for the potholes they fix, maybe tagging them like graffiti artists.
—bungston, Dec 23 2010
   

       If you wait long enough, the potholes become confluent, and the road surface is level again.
—mouseposture, Dec 23 2010
   

       7 years after the original post, this is now baked.. but on large medium and heavy duty trucks owned by the city. They can actually fill a pothole without having to leave the truck. They just view it on the on-board camera, line up the hose, and then it shoots out a mixture of asphalt and epoxy polymers that fill in the hole in less that 15 minutes.
—Jscotty, Dec 23 2010
   

       Thinking potholes again. I heard a radio news article on an overcrowded boarding school in Sudan. The reporter noted that the courtyard and grounds were trashed; full of garbage and weeds. On entering the dorm it was crammed with students lying around.   

       My thought: why weren't the students organized to clean up the trash and weeds. Answer - because the owners of the school did not encourage or facilitate this.   

       I thought of this again on watching a series of people on bikes negotiate a perilous crack and pothole-riddled stretch of road near a school. These people probably rode that strecth every day. Why don't they get together and fix it? Because the owners of the road don't encourage or facilitate this.
—bungston, Mar 16 2011
   

       Is it a public road? If so then the bicyclist's probably *are* the owners.
—mouseposture, Mar 17 2011
   

       There is a two word phrase that will unfortunately kill this idea, together with many other public spirited attempts to get up and do something.   

       That phrase is "public liability".   

       In the current climate of no-win-no-fee vultures, individuals are encouraged to claim compensation for what would normally be considered to be either an accident (where everyone has acted within reason) or an event which was blatantly due to the individual's own negligence.
—Twizz, Mar 17 2011
   

       The main problem is the steepness of the pothole's sides, is it not?   

       A mechanically simpler option might be a sort of vehicle- mounted router, which would simply chamfer the pothole edges to a 9-degree slope.
—MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 17 2011
   


 

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