Filling In Potholes Yourself

From the Chicago Tribune via Taranto at the WSJ:

Do you have gaping potholes on your street and feel the city is not fixing them quickly enough? How about patching them yourself? That's what a group of residents on Chicago's West Side did Wednesday. Members of the South Austin Coalition bought eight bags of a pavement mix for about $100 and used shovels, rakes and a 250-pound push roller to fill 15 holes on the 4800 block of West Van Buren Street....

For starters, it's not safe for people to work in the street without taking safety measures like putting up orange cones to warn traffic, said Brian Steele, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation. Secondly, city crews are trained in the art of filling potholes—cleaning them out, pouring in the asphalt mix, making it compact and then rolling the patch with mechanical rollers, not the kind you can push.

The driveway mixture the group used in this case may have only cost a little more than $10 for a 50-pound bag, but the city says the $100-per-ton of high performance cold patch it purchases is worth it.