Experts say that climate change will only make potholes worse
People in Ottawa are starting to see signs of spring after a snowy winter and cold weather that kept the Rideau Canal Skateway closed for the first time ever.
Rising temperatures can also cause roads to crumble and look like the moon’s surface. It feels like riding a mechanical bull when you drive your car.
Everyone who lives in Ottawa knows that spring is pothole season.
Changes in temperature cause brittle, frozen asphalt to expand and contract in a destructive cycle, and the sun’s stronger rays melt the ice that has been hiding holes in the road for weeks.
Every one of Ottawa’s 6,000 kilometers of roads goes through the city’s average of nearly 80 freeze-thaw cycles each year. Every spring, crews fill hundreds of thousands of potholes. So far this year, they have filled 17,435 potholes.
Roads made without taking climate change into accoun
Some experts say that the situation will only get worse.
A professor of civil engineering at Carleton University, Kamal Hossain, said, “We built these roads many years ago without thinking about how climate change might affect them.”
Crews have always used a certain glue for asphalt, but that glue breaks down easily when it gets hot. As Ottawa experiences hotter temperatures, it softens the asphalt and ultimately weakens the road further, he said.
This is something that the City of Ottawa is well aware of. Last spring, staff made a detailed report about the risks to city infrastructure and people’s health as the weather gets warmer, wetter, and stormierle’s health as the weather gets warmer, wetter, and stormier. Roads in Ottawa are at the top of the list.
“Road materials are not rated for the size and length of the projected heat events,” says the city’s report on how vulnerable it is to climate change. It said that winter freeze-thaw cycles “are especially bad” for roads and sidewalks because they cause cracking, lifting, potholes, and rutting.
Pothole price tag growin
Crews already fix tens of thousands of potholes every year, and since 2018, they have fixed more than 1.1 million in total. As the cost of labor, materials, and expanding Ottawa’s road network goes up, so does the cost of repairs.
Over the last five years, the city’s budget for asphalt repairs and maintenance has steadily gone up, and that doesn’t even count the more expensive jobs like repaving whole roads.
Julie Bowen, who works for the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) division for northern and eastern Ontario, said that road users also have to pay, especially those who keep driving old cars to save money even though they are more likely to break down.
Potholes can cause damage to a car that can cost up to $6,000 to fix, such as a blown tire or a broken (and possibly loose) bumper.
“Ontario has about 34,000 kilometers of roads that we think are bad or very bad,” said Bowen. “Someone is going to get hurt no matter how they move.”
The city says that solutions are too expensive
Hossain said that the solution, which is to change how roads are built, will cost a lot of money.
Some places, like the three Canadian territories, use concrete to make roads last longer, but it’s more expensive than putting down asphalt.
The Federal Highway Administration in the U.S. spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year to study road building and maintenance. “It’s a shame that it doesn’t have that part in Canada,” Hossain said.
For the City of Ottawa, building roads over the last 10 years has been a time of trial and error.
In 2018, contracts with asphalt suppliers were canceled because an audit in 2017 found that the materials didn’t meet the standards needed to fix roads and potholes.
Councilman Tim Tierney, who is in charge of the city’s transportation committee, says that the city is still looking for a long-term solution that won’t break the bank.
Tierney, who has been on the city council for more than 12 years, remembered a time when crews tried to improve road grip by using beet juice but failed.
He said that there was no money in the budget for concrete.
Still, he says that the city already spends a lot of time and money keeping its roads in good shape. In 2019, Ottawa bought two Python 5000s, which cost $400,000 each and automatically fill potholes with asphalt, clean them, and pack them down.
Tierney said that by the end of March, there will be four Pythons in Ottawa’s fleet of repair vehicles.
Tierney said, “As industry and technology improve, I hope we’ll have a better solution.”