Dear Bwana of the Byways: I live in a working class Little Rock 'hood. When the city fills the potholes, they plop down some asphalt and run. The truck hardly stops. The patch lasts until it rains. In ritzier areas, I see nice squares cut and careful patches made. Am I a victim of class oppression? -- Let's Marx Together
Dear Marxist: Your tongue-in-cheek comment about class oppression brought to mind something Stalin said. That is, "Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union." Oh, those happy, dancing prisoners of the Gulag Archipelago!
(Read the book, A. Solzhenitsyn, author and survivor. Exclamation point in previous paragraph signifies irony.)
BTW: We think Stalin meant "gay" in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
Whatever. We figured that any oppression to be dished out was done so by the city's Public Works Department. So we asked the commissar in charge, Jon Honeywell, to expound on this matter.
He did so at length, first by pointing out that his department has crews working every single workday repairing potholes that are reported to the city's 311 phone system. And then the crews drive around looking for potholes that haven't been reported.
The 311 system gets about 1,500 pothole complaints a year, he said, and that doesn't include those roads that are state highways and thus under the maintenance of the Arkansas Department of Transportation. Think Arkansas 10, people, or Cantrell Road, which from downtown to the city's western limits is one of the most heavily traveled highways in the state.
Why are there potholes? When water saturates the street's base material, it causes the failure of the asphalt surface.
Public Works fixes potholes rain or shine, Honeywell told us. During winter, when hot-mix asphalt is unavailable, potholes are fixed with a "compacted high performance cold mix designed to perform in these adverse conditions."
When the weather is dry, the crews take out the loose debris, spray the hole with a tacky substance in order to bond the new asphalt to the road and then put in impacted hot-mix asphalt.
Both methods, Honeywell said, seal the surface to keep rainwater from getting back to the base.
Please, he concluded, call 311 to report those potholes.
Changing the subject, we'd like to share something from Steve, an old friend and bookend.
Steve spent 33 years with the Arkansas Department of Transportation, and had plenty of opportunities, as he said, to play in traffic.
When walking on any road, Steve said with great authority, always walk facing traffic. Doing so assures drivers that the walker has his eyes on the vehicle and shouldn't make a move into the vehicle's path.
Walking with traffic, a pedestrian may not hear an approaching vehicle. If there is no other choice than to walk with traffic, get as far right as possible.
And that, folks, is today's pedestrian lesson.
Vanity plate on a black Corvette: SHK BKE.
Fjfellone@gmail.com
Metro on 06/02/2018