City’s war on winter potholes

City Transportation Department [DOT] highway maintenance crews are continuing a massive round-the-clock “pothole repair program to fix Queens’ battered road system. To meet this road repair emergency, 14 DOT crews plugged nearly 1,100 borough potholes during the past weekend.
With March just around the corner, city DOT crews are also scheduled to begin upgrading 102 lane miles of Queens streets in Community Boards 7, 11, 12, and 14. These final 88 street repair projects will complete DOT’s in-house borough-wide street repairs started last July, and postponed between November and February.
The DOT’s road resurfacing program is based on maintaining local roadway conditions . . . from repairing a tiny tenth of a mile on 189th St., just off 118th Ave., to a giant 4.3-mile stretch along Guy R. Brewer Blvd., between Linden Blvd. and North Conduit Blvd.
Keeping Queens’ highways clear are not just important to local residents but essential to the City’s economic viability. Queens contains New York City’s largest and most complex street and highway systems. The projects are designed to maintain Queens’ heavily used 2,443 miles of street and arterial systems that link the borough’s 20,056 blocks.
Community Boards 7, 8 and 11, in northeast Queens, have a combined roadway mileage that is almost twice as large as Manhattan’s (968 vs. 504), but have only one subway station. Well over 1.5 million cars and trucks travel through Queens every day.
According to highway engineers potholes are created by a three-step “freeze/thaw/freeze” cycle: Moisture seeps into a pavement crack, freezes, expands, and then thaws, creating a larger crack that eventually collapses under the pounding of traffic. Compounding this problem, is that Queens has already undergone two recent freeze/thaw cycles.