It’s a war of attrition. Every time your car survives a run-in with a pothole, it takes a little more damage.
You might not notice at first. Your tires weaken with every thud. Your suspension arms and levers twist and bend. The rubber wears off, and you don’t even notice the sound getting clunkier and clunkier.
But sometimes it’s quicker. The asphalt rips through your tire or smashes your wheel out of shape. Even if you get it back on the road, it’s not the same as before.
It’s not your fault (although we’ll go into some ways you can minimize damage). Potholes happen when the asphalt cracks under the pressure of temperature changes, usually in winter and spring. Poor road workmanship doesn’t help. And worst of all are the authorities who leave potholes lying there, sprung like traps.
The best thing to do if you spot a pothole is to report it to your local city, county, or Department of Transportation. A quick web search shows you how. But of course, when people get angry these days, they usually report it to 330 million other users on Twitter. The Clunker Junker deduced that Twitter data is probably the best way to gauge which cities in the U.S. have the biggest problem. So, we grabbed the data and made some maps and charts.
Image Credit: Vitalii Petrushenko / iStock.
Rhode Island is America’s ‘Pothole State’
First, we figured out the number of pothole-themed tweets from every area in the U.S. over the course of a year. Then we figured the total road length of every city and state. And then we crushed these figures together to get the number of Twitter pothole complaints per 1,000km of road in each area.
“We used to call it ‘The Pothole State,’” tweets Rhode Islander Melanie Joy. Rhode Island is pothole state No. 1 by some leap, with 23.4 pothole tweets per 1,000km (621 miles) of road – beating out second-placed Hawaii (20.6).
“Riding a motorcycle in Hawaii is a mixture of absorbing breathtaking views and then nearly dying by driving into a pothole big enough to be a bomb crater,” tweets Joe Kassabian.
Idaho is the smooth drivin’ state, with local news and government sharing satisfying videos of potholes being filled. The tweet count for Idaho plus potholes is significantly raised by drivers nowhere near Idaho using the phrase “Idaho-sized pothole” to describe far-flung road hazards.
Here are the top 10 places in the U.S. with the most tweets complaining about potholes per 100km (62 miles) of road.
Image Credit: OgnjenO / iStock.
10. Buffalo, New York
Annual number of tweets per 100km: 212.2
Image Credit: istockphoto/Hsa_Htaw.
9. Philadelphia
Annual number of tweets per 100km: 266.2
Image Credit: DepositPhotos.com.
8. New York City
Annual number of tweets per 100km: 280.4
Image Credit: DepositPhotos.com.
7. Boston
Annual number of tweets per 100km: 303.2
Image Credit: DepositPhotos.com.
6. Pittsburgh
Annual number of tweets per 100km: 303.8
Image Credit: DepositPhotos.com.
5. Miami
Annual number of tweets per 100km: 310.3
Image Credit: espiegle/istockphoto.
4. New Orleans
Annual number of tweets per 100km: 324.4
Image Credit: DepositPhotos.com.
3. St. Louis
Annual number of tweets per 100km: 385.2
Image Credit: istockphoto.
2. Washington, D.C.
Annual number of tweets per 100km: 451.4
Image Credit: DepositPhotos.com.
1. Atlanta
Annual number of tweets per 100km: 529.1
Image Credit: Deposit Photos.
Drive with Caution to Minimize Pothole Damage
Potholes are big news right now, with President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill on the table and, more seriously, the famous Seinfeld pothole cropped out of Netflix reruns (“there’s not really a number to call if you wanna make a pothole.”)
To prevent potholes from becoming an issue for you, driving with caution is the best route.
Try to:
- Leave space between cars so you can spot upcoming potholes.
- Avoid big puddles.
- Slow down ahead of unmissable potholes and ease off the brake at the last moment.
- Check your tires and rims regularly.
- Not ignore suspension noise.
Image Credit: undefined undefined / iStock.
Methodology
We used Twitter API to extract tweets from the UK and the US, including the terms ‘pothole’ and ‘potholes,’ and extrapolated the data to calculate the number of tweets over a year.
We used Github and Overpass API to discover road length for every city and every region in the research. We then calculated the number of complaints per 1,000km of road. To calculate the data for England counties, we merged City of London and Greater London.
The data was collected in August-September 2021.
You can find sources used and more data on U.K. and U.S. potholes per city here.
This article
originally appeared on TheClunkerJunker.com and was
syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
Image Credit: MarcBruxelle / iStock.
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