Road surfaces and public utilities

[Bobonli]

This is part rant and part question for anyone in the public transportation / traffic engineering professions.

Why are public utilities allowed to tear up the road and then not repair it back to the condition it was in before they started?

Example: A lot of people are hopping on the natural gas bus in NY. So PSEG are ripping of the roads--usually the shoulders where cyclists ride- to lay in gas mains and feeder pipes. Or another favorite project is replacing fire hydrants. They rip up the road and either fill the holes with blacktop making moguls worthy of a black diamond ski run or fill them incompletely leaving min-holes that you can fall into. I rode through a stretch this afternoon that looked like they literally just tossed the blacktop into the ditch and walked away; it wasn't evened out or packed down.

Why aren't they required to fill the holes properly and make the road surface level again OR repave the swath of road entirely?

Seriously...does anyone know?

[Dave Thompson]

I can't speak for your area but in mine when a road/street is dug up, the company doing the job is mandated to redo its' work to the condition that previously existed. Also if that work (sewer, electric, water, etc.) requires that the work be done on your property, that work also must be restored to the properties previous condition.

[EricKeller]

if it's a hazard, you should complain

[mmoore]

sort of an odd beast here... the municipally owned infrastructure isn't required to get the permit to do the work but the assumption is that they would put it back in to spec.

The private companies that do work like this need permits which normally have a security attached that has to be inspected a year later.... but its rarely enforced.


Its terrible in the downtown areas or areas going through massive retrofits... but some reinstatements are just done really poor because a contractor is trying to save money and the inspectors aren't always there.

[Tom]

Sometimes the highway department doesn't talk to itself. They spent most of last summer milling off, fixing the road bed and repaving the stretch of hill on NYS 146 that comes up off the river. It's not quite half a mile from the bottom, averages maybe 7-8 percent. It was a mess beforehand, it needed it. They paved it smooth as a baby's butt end and even widened the shoulders, it being a popular bike route we all smiled. For about three weeks. Then they came in to put the rip rap on the bank to the uphill side. The method was to dump the big rocks on the side of the traffic lane and shove them where they were supposed to go with a Bobcat. Now about fifty yards of the shoulder is grooved like you're trying to ride up a railroad track on the ties. How come they couldn't have done that before they paved? No idea.