Anyone who has ever driven on a road before would be familiar with the term “potholes.” Usually, it consists of a small hole on a road’s surface, and they can range from a minor inconvenience when driving to a vehicle accident just waiting to happen.
I, for one, am no stranger to potholes. A while ago, the place I currently live in here in Moscow, Idaho used to have potholes all over the parking lot; to the point where I had to make specific maneuvers around both the holes and the parked cars just to get out of the area. Sometimes I would simply ignore the potholes and drive over them, only for a loud THUMP to remind me why I avoided them in the first place. They promised to revamp the parking roads back in November of 2023, making them all nice and clean. Then they painted the parking lines and called it a day, not fulfilling their promise to fix the other issues for another four months.
It wasn’t the only place in Moscow where I ran into potholes. At the Palouse Mall over by the west side of the town there were also potholes in the middle of the parking area; however, they were much easier to avoid due to the overall size of the parking lot.
One might think the issue is easy to resolve and that officials, more specifically the Idaho Transportation Department, simply need to come over and fill up the potholes with some asphalt. That would sound true, until one realizes the level of laziness the state and the rest of the country display in solving the problem.
For example, in November of 2016, a 30-meter sinkhole formed in the Japanese city of Fukuoka, threatening to topple nearby buildings. In response, Japanese workers worked around the clock to fill up the sinkhole and patch up the road in a matter of days, reopening to traffic and pedestrians shortly after confirming it’s safe to move across. Now compare that to a regular pothole in the rural parts of the U.S. that formed as far back as the nineties and remained there to this very day.
Now, I don’t mean to claim that the U.S. and local authorities do absolutely nothing, nor do they completely ignore the issue. Very recently, the pothole issue I mentioned earlier was resolved when they filled them up with asphalt, allowing me and many others to drive through without hearing that loud THUMP.
However, that’s only a temporary solution. I noticed that as I drove over the former potholes, they would gradually go back to how they once were. Eventually, the problem I faced before would come back to pester me again. Similarly, potholes could also be found in the eastbound lane of highway 53, showing it’s a reoccurring issue constantly being tended to with the equivalent of applying a bandage to a gaping wound.
In my opinion, the way the U.S. and our states handle the issue of potholes shows their lack of care or concern regarding public roads. Not only do they stall in fixing the issue, but when they do get around to doing it, they do the bare minimum. If they could show the level of commitment to filling up the problem like Japan would commit to filling up sinkholes, then we wouldn’t have over fifty-five million potholes across the United States of America. The moral of the story: the U.S. has a lot of potholes and is too lethargic to fill them.
Lee Cloward can be reached at [email protected]