After years of neglect, an NYS DOT crew started a really nice repair job on the inside edge of the curve just north of our house. They milled out the deteriorated road surface, cleaned out the debris, and laid in a patch flush with the road surface. That’s quite unlike their usual shovel-some-cold-patch / hand-tamp / drive-over-it process, made familiar everywhere else around here.

Unfortunately, for unknown reasons, they didn’t fill in the last two feet of the milled-out trench, leaving a tooth-shattering pair of perpendicular edges exactly where you’d least expect them:

Rt 376 north of Heathbrook – unfinished patch

Ran out of asphalt? Lunch break? Called off to another emergency? We’ll never know.

I sent a note, with that picture, to the NYS DOT Bicycle & Pedestrian Coordinator, asking what happened; perhaps they planned another layer atop the whole curve to seal the rest of the cracked pavement?

The next day a crew filled in the hole, which I find far more than coincidental.

Although it’s better than it was, there’s now a joint that will deteriorate more rapidly than the uniform asphalt layer they should have created.

We’ll take what we get…