Today’s Headlines

Exact same thing happens by me all the time. A street will be in crappy shape for ages. When it finally gets repaved, it’s all but guaranteed it’ll be dug up and patched to death within 6 months even though no utility work was done there for the last 20 years. Sometimes I think car repair places pay off the city to do this on purpose so the roads are always in poor condition.

And when major work is done, like digging trenches or opening big holes, we should stipulate the entire street has to be reconstructed when the work is done. Not patched, but rebuilt down to the concrete subroadbed under strict NYC supervision. Same thing when sidewalks are broken. If you break up someone’s sidewalk, you should have to replace the entire thing at your expense, not just put down one mismatched square.

If we do all these things we might see some planning where if someone is opening up a street for, say, sewer work, you’ll get other entities to do their repairs or upgrades while the street is opened up. We might also see some plans to make utilities accessible without needed to break up streets.

There’s really no excuse for the status quo. Other places have as many underground utilities as NYC but they manage to keep them in repair without having streets perpetually in third world condition.

Funny you mentioned that because my brother told me some of the highways he drives on went to sh*t literally overnight a few years ago after a heavy snow. On my own block I see places where the plow scraped the asphalt right off. For that and a multitude of other reasons NYC needs to go with concrete streets.

No Joe, New York is the oldest city on the planet!
And the ONLY city in the world with underground utilities, don’t you know that?

The “before” pictures look better than many NYC streets AFTER they have been resurfaced.

The Bergen Street bike lane between 5th and 4th Avenues has a bad patch about every 15 feet (one for each brownstone on the block), from soon after it was repaved. Predictably, many cyclists ride outside the lane to avoid them. I complained to DOT and was told it was fine.

Driver who killed Matthew Brenner banned from driving in New York following civil suit. NYPD completely dropped the ball. https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160818/brooklyn-heights/actress-banned-from-driving-new-york-2-years-after-fatal-accident-state

A disappointing stretch of recently-repaved street is on Johnson Avenue near the Brooklyn/Queens border at Flushing Avenue.

Johnson Avenue is a straight-line between Williamsburg and Ridgewood. It has plenty of trucks during middays; but it is pretty good during morning and evening commute times. And it has a long stretch with no parking. So it’s a very useful bike route; it beats Grand Street, despite the presence on Grand of a bike lane. Just last summer Johnson Avenue received a much-needed repaving for its entire length.

But at Johnson’s eastern end, starting at about Scott Avenue, there is this weird accretion of dried concrete, pebbles, sand, and gravel on the right edge of the eastbound side of this two-way street. This condition continues past Johnson’s end at Flushing Avenue, and then for a few blocks onto Cypress Avenue.

I can only guess that this is not down to anything that the DOT did wrong, but that it is the result of actions on the part of some of the private companies that line the street. Still, it’s the DOT’s responsibility to maintain the street. I have put in a 311 complaint; let’s see if that does anything.

I disagree. The NYU Rudin center and Sarah Kaufman show that they don’t care and that their “expertise” is worthless. “Well actually, Staten Island…” [trails off and looks at phone] “…APPS!”
Riders Alliance is somewhat better but has no vision other than improving existing service. TransitCenter people are actually trying to implement system expansions that would connect Staten Island, and other currently unconnected areas. Transit enthusiasts, not useless academics or special interest think tankers.

The first TransitCenter guy wasn’t as stupid as the second one. It was the second one that had the Tourette’s outburst about poop.

I don’t necessarily have a huge problem with some of those extensions, but both the SIRT extension to Manhattan and that L expansion are not exactly top priorities. They are acceptable on geographic equity grounds, especially if land use can be changed to accommodate some more density. But the L extension also creates problems – a busy, overcrowded line gets more passengers and even when the L is not busy the travel time to Manhattan would be kind of obscene for the new riders.

It seems reasonable for when they rip up the street to move most (if not all) of these services into pre-cast utility trenches.

I can’t understand why they’re not doing that when they tear up entire streets for utility replacement and reconstruction. (Lower Broadway, Chambers St, etc.)