
Oakland’s Pothole Vigilantes address gaping problem, one road crater at a time - hhs
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-s-Pothole-Vigilantes-address-gaping-13899311.php
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cameronh90
Also see Britain's vigilante pothole superhero, "Wanksy":
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11570595/Meet-
the...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11570595/Meet-the-man-
using-penises-to-fill-potholes.html)

~~~
justnotworthit
That city council sure hates it when someone makes them look stupid. I like
how that guy claims that children will be dramatized by crude drawings of a
penis. Does he know that half of those children have a real one and aren't
traumatized?

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m0llusk
The math here says more about America's road addiction than anything else.
Oakland has an unusually large mileage of roads which are unusually broad.
Additionally many of these roads are on unstable hillsides. The reality is
that even if Oakland were hugely wealthy and efficient with its resources then
there would still be a problem. Treating road repair like some kind of moral
issue clouds the real costs.

~~~
rangeofmotion
I don't know which roads the vigilantes are focusing on. But my guess is they
aren't concerned with the less frequently used roads on the hillsides. They're
probably more concerned with the ones that should be obvious to city officials
to fix sooner rather than later. The ones that impact people significantly
near the higher concentrations of homes and places of business.

The road conditions in Oakland have been this way for decades. And whenever
you talk about a problem like this in Oakland, it calls forth the general
condition of Oakland, which very much is a moral problem (both due to the
alleged corruption that keeps it from changing as well as the fact that you
can barely enter the city without being confronted by extreme poverty and
people with severe mental health problems who are just left behind). The holes
in the road have at least one thing in common with the overall state of the
city: neglect.

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snarfy
. “If someone gets hurt on the repair you made, you’re opening yourself to
liability.”

What if someone gets in a car wreck because of a pothole? Is the city liable?

~~~
justnotworthit
The arguments against them were absurd. Essentially: (1) Don't help people if
there's a chance the broken justice system hangs you for it. (2) Don't help
people unless you can help everyone. (3) Don't help because thinking about how
the government is failing at one of its primary jobs makes us feel bad and
makes the government look like it's failing at one of its primary jobs.

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reaperducer
In Chicago they just fill the potholes with pickled peppers and onions.

No, really: [https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/4/29/18621740/this-wgn-
anc...](https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/4/29/18621740/this-wgn-anchor-
filling-a-pothole-with-giardiniera-is-the-most-chicago-thing-ever)

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cwkoss
The vigilantes should sue Oakland for expenses at the end of the year, would
make for a hell of a case, particularly if they can demonstrate safety and
quality at lower cost than govt would have spent.

~~~
tantalor
That's absurd. They are not owed anything. The city has no contact with them.

What they ought to do is pay a bounty per job, and bond the "vigilantes"
against injury/damage.

~~~
sneak
Your first paragraph would make sense if they were not required to pay city
taxes.

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m463
When Elon Musk got the boring company going, I couldn't help wondering why
there weren't entreprenuers in paving.

Why don't we have giant computer-controlled machines that go down roads, suck
them in and grind them up and spit out new roads behind themselves -- as the
defacto paving scenario?

I know they do this sometimes. But why not all the time? Instead of pothole
fixing, just fix the entire road. Cheap road machines, drive the price down.
And put down lane markings and reflectors as part of the process. And do every
thing only at night.

~~~
reaperducer
Because nobody wants to be the mayor who replaced 500 high-paying union jobs
with five machines.

~~~
ALittleLight
How about the mayor who fixed the terrible roads?

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geezerjay
Voters don't remember which maintenance task was performed last month, but
union types don't forget who acted against their interests.

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neonate
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190629020151/https://www.sfchr...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190629020151/https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-
s-Pothole-Vigilantes-address-gaping-13899311.php)

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joncrane
We need one of these for each borough of the Washington DC area.

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MrMorden
The city council needs to be replaced with people who aren't quite as crooked.
Fortunately, the FBI is actively working on this problem. One down, seven to
go.

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dole
I'm sure other vigilantes have been doing this for longer, but this seems like
one of the major initial instigators of the movement:
[https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/03/portland-
anarchists-w...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/03/portland-anarchists-
want-to-fix-your-streets-potholes/519588/)

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HillaryBriss
none of the local politicians in this article express any embarrassment or
shame over their city's failure to maintain the streets in good working order

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stellar678
The current crop of local politicians are not to blame - it’s squarely the
fault of generations of politicians and voters who severely overbuilt road
systems without a plan to fund maintenance.

We should tear out 50% of our asphalt and replace it with dense housing -
there’s a shocking number of giant, underutilized roads that are large enough
to accommodate entire buildings. That’s how you increase density and actually
fund your infrastructure.

~~~
sxates
Are you talking about oakland specifically or American cities generally? I
don't really think this applies to oakland, which was built out 50-100 years
ago and has almost no new roads in the last several decades.

Maintenance was deferred here for way too long, and now it's going to take a
long time and a lot of money to get caught up.

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droithomme
Harry Tuttle is busy.

~~~
dredmorbius
Here's your receipt, and my receipt for your receipt.

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nathanvanfleet
why blame individual residents for the government's disfunction?

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jeffrallen
Git 'er done!

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rangeofmotion
Oakland is a disaster. If I recall correctly, someone from the U.N. went to
Oakland a year or two ago and declared a humanitarian crisis or something to
that effect. I remember the wording was quite strong, saying that it matched
conditions in third world countries they've been to which are in crisis. How
people can just step right past so many homeless people and so much obvious
city disrepair and human brokenness for years on end is beyond me. Yet Oakland
and nearby Berkeley are home to a lot of people who are considered
"progressive" and "caring" and who supposedly want a better world. If you
can't achieve positive results for the people in your immediate vicinity
(which the people of Oakland and Berkeley very much have the power to do,
especially with things as simple as potholes), then do you get to count
yourself as a person who can say they are working towards a better world?
Thumbs up for these so-called vigilantes. They talk less and act more. I just
hope they don't let the mayor co-opt their efforts by letting her go around
saying she's all about it.

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m463
I remember reading a story by a motorcyclist who had ridden around the world.
He had ridden through the most inhospitable places - some because of nature,
some because of warfare.

I believe he was going through a US city and slept under a tree with his bike
parked nearby, and he was woken and told it was too dangerous to do that. I
thought it was Oakland, (but I might have misremembered and it was some other
dangerous urban area).

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bacon_waffle
I've spent many months cycling and walking throughout the US, mainly in the
2000s; it was striking to me to learn how scared some people are of the world
around them.

I could imagine your story playing out anywhere - someone saying "it's too
dangerous to do that here", doesn't actually mean much about the actual
danger.

