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In the days of yore, if you were a city official and wanted to fix a pothole, you’d just send out a road crew to do it. A typical squad of four men could repair five of them in the course of an average day, including breaks for lunch, coffee, and scratching their butts.
Now things have changed. There is a futuristic new machine called the pothole killer that allows one person–who never has to get out of the truck cab–to “hot patch” 100 potholes in a day. (Watch the video for details.) In other words, the machine makes human labor nearly 100 times more efficient in repairing damaged roads. Fixing a pothole the old way: $70; Fixing a pothole the new way: $3. Technology at work, children.
The company that makes the device, Patch Management, also claims that repairs made by the Pothole Killer last four times longer than those done by old-fashioned “throw and go” technique (i.e. what road crews generally do).
Great, right — saves money and makes roads last longer? In a “gee whiz” sense, yes. But the question has to be asked: Isn’t infrastructure repair one of the main strategies we’re using to create jobs? Since the Pothole Killer is functionally a job killer, it might make sense to hold off using it on a large scale until this whole recessionary unpleasantness is behind us.
In the meantime, perhaps Colonel Sanders will take up some of the slack.
UPDATE: Our friend Jim Foti at the excellent Road Guy blog alerts us to this informative graphic explaining how the Pothole Killer works its magic.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Um, no. Instead of wasting money and labor fixing potholes with manual labor, use this whiz-bang doohickey for that and use the leftover money and manpower to build more rail lines or bike lanes or any of the other myriad improvements that need doing.
There is no such thing as a shortage of work, only a shortage of motivation.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
It sounds like this is only a temporary fix though, so the actual cost is higher than just $3. And they only seem to be using it for shallow, residential road-side potholes, not those behemoths that actually do the most damage in the middle of a busy lane.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
They’ve been using the pothole killer in Houston for a while. Since our potholes **always** come back, its main advantage seems to be that traffic isn’t blocked but for a few minutes while it’s being filled. The repairs seem to last at least as long as the ones done by hand.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Anon #1:
I think you’ve got me on this one.
-Jebediah
May 20th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Though I’ll add: A Keynesian, in arguing that governments can spend a country out of a recession, would say that it doesn’t really matter what kind of work the person does. So to whatever extent there is money that could be taken from pothole filling and spent on something more useful, like fixing bridges or upgrading disused rail lines, great. But that’s only if it’s zero sum. If there’s a standalone choice between “wasting” money on the old-fashion way of filling potholes and spending less to do it with a Pothole Killer, we should “waste” that money as vigorously as possible.
-Jebediah
May 21st, 2009 at 11:17 am
So would you rather hire five people to fix potholes, or hire one person to fix potholes and avoid laying off four teachers or firemen?
May 21st, 2009 at 11:54 am
Well, that’s not at all what I’d like. But if you get $1 million in federal stimulus loot for road repairs, it’s not like you can just say, oh, let’s use it to pay firemen instead.
In cases where that’s an option, then obviously.
May 21st, 2009 at 2:46 pm
The city of Springfield, MO has been using one of these machines for a few years now. While it is efficient, any automation like this is a job killer.
Welfare should come with a timeclock punch card. It shouldn’t be free money for those who won’t… any monkey can shovel hot pitch and gravel in a hole especially those on welfare.
Let’s get some programs together somewhat like Missouri did back in the 1920’s with the campaign to “Get Missouri Out Of The Mud!”, but now it’s more like “Get Missouri Out Of The Hole!” Pothole, that is…
Just think of the Socialistic slogan we can use… Arbeit macht frei… or, Work makes you free. Just like over the gate at Auschwitz.
May 21st, 2009 at 5:48 pm
KCL, you do know that the Nazis arrested, imprisoned and executed socialists, don’t you?
Anon No. 1 makes the salient point: We have plenty of work to be done in this country and plenty of people available to do it. What we don’t have is a mechanism for matching up available work with available workers in a way that gets the workers paid. If you can patch a pothole for $3 instead of $70, that’s $67 you can use to pay laid-off construction workers to rehab dilapidated homes a mile and a half from the central business district.
May 22nd, 2009 at 10:55 am
There’s one of these operating in Trenton, NJ. It doesn’t live up to the hype. It makes a mound of sticky asphalt and gravel that dislodges within a week onto people’s shoes and tires.
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
John,, that sounds to me like a very poor machine operator……….
May 22nd, 2009 at 7:43 pm
“Since the Pothole Killer is functionally a job killer, it might make sense to hold off using it on a large scale until this whole recessionary unpleasantness is behind us.”
WRONG!
The proper function of government is to provide basic services — NOT to provide jobs.
Government officials have a fiduciary responsibility to employ our tax dollars as efficiently as possible. Taxpayers first! Not jobs.