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:
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…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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3 responses to “NYS DOT Patch Quality”
[…] Anyhow, bikes can’t stay too far to the right after the box, because the asphalt has crumbled away in furrows around Yet Another Crappy Patch: […]
Apparently Poughkeepsie has not yet sprinkled “sharrow” (a stylized bike under two arrow heads) markings all over the place as they have in my hometown. Sharrows are suppose to make it perfectly safe for bicycles to share the road with 18 wheeler trucks and fifteen year olds on their first jaunt behind the wheel.
Sharrows aren’t a thing here, although Beacon painted some on Main Steet; NYS DOT wants no part of making cyclists anything other than speed bumps.
But our new drivers start at 16, so they’re much safer.