Well we had one of the most beautiful weekends you could imagine for January in Seattle. Sunshine and mid 60's. Should have been top down weather but alas one nasty piece of road spoiled that.

Took a turn from a main road onto a side street, the side street had some abandoned rail track running through it that (after) looked like it had been filled in with asphalt, poorly. Unfortunately this was in the shade of the elevated road that paralleled the main street. Never saw it coming. The impact was pretty serious, enough I immediately pulled over to check things over. Right off the bat their was a serious clunking that I was able to identify pretty quick as the fuel tank baffle. Shortly thereafter it was apparent that at least one tire was shot, turns out it was 2 of them, bulging on the sidewalls and you could see a bulge for each individual impact (leading edge of hole, the piece of track in the middle, trailing edge of hole). While getting those two tires replaced they said one wheel was slightly bent and the other was cracked.

Went from the pothole to the tire store to home. Next morning got up and got the dreaded ABC warning - Drive Carefully. Checked fluid and it had burped out a fair amount, and now the dipstick read slightly low, by about half an inch. topped it off but error wouldn't clear. Plugged in my Carsoft MB2 and was showing 1 bar of pressure on the ABC system. Looks like it blew an accumulator but the system is staying off-line. Car is being towed to the shop to see if it is just an accumulator or if the pump is gone too. I also have an error that one of the struts is showing travel despite being "locked" suggesting a valve block, which wouldn't be impossible if the front accumulator blew.

The good news is I invested in a really high end (Blackvue DR900s-2ch) 4k dashcam. It recorded the event, logged it as a "major" impact and the g-force sensors within it were pegged to the limits for all 3 axis it measures. So I have solid evidence of what happened and when. The City of Seattle has a claims process but it is slow, like months to years. Typically they won't pay unless you have at least 1 witness and they have received other claims for the same pothole to corroborate the issue. If it is just an accumulator I'll pay to fix, do the spring repair on the baffle and buy new wheels and tires. But if it is going to be a pump, an accumulator, a strut and or a valve block, fuel tank plus wheels and tires I'll probably file and insurance claim and let them go after the city as that would collectively (with a new fuel tank) get close to $8000 to $10000 I'd guess.

All because of one poorly maintained piece of road.

 

This is why my SL will never cross the lake.

 

Ouch sorry!

Upload the video?

 

Wow, sorry to hear what happened.

 

And this makes me think of the dump truck cover the load law that none of the dump trucks ever do. Then we can talk about the 7 foot wide parking spaces most all park lots have so you can get your many thousands of dollar cars banged up in. Sorry this stuff just is just illogical nonsense, no excuse for it. If you or I tried to fill those ruts what would they do?

 

Back home in Honolulu we had a pothole that we complained about for 5 months and a couple of neighbors and I finally got tired of them not doing anything about it so we went to Home Depot and purchased some quick concrete and filled it in ourselves. 3 days later the city finally came out and jack hammered up the concrete and just stuck a cone in the hole. Stayed that way for another 2 weeks before they finally came back and filled it properly with asphalt. It was so frustratingly silly..

 

 

 

Here is the dash cam video. I repeat it at a slower rate as at full speed it doesn't seem quite so bad. Though bear in mind the ABC is designed to mitigate rough roads so it was working extra hard on this one.
Below that is a pic showing the g-force the dash cam recorded, pegged it all 3 axis, and at the bottom end pegged it hard enough it's clear it would have registered more had it been able to.

 

Another thought on this - find out which company owns the railroad tracks. Around here, they, not the city/count/state are responsible for maintaining the crossing.

 

 

One of the problems with our tax structure is that fuel taxes fund roads, but those are flat "cents per gallon" taxes. As cars become more efficient, we collect less in fuel taxes, yet the cost of maintaining roads has increased exponentially over the years. No longer can you just pave a road. now, there has to be appropriate studies for proper drainage, environmental impacts and safety barriers. Of course those are all worthwhile expenditures, but we really need to change the way we fund these projects.

An example of the ridiculously high cost of road repairs is going on here in Birmingham, Alabama. Over the last few years, they have been rebuilding and reworking the intersection of I-65 and I-20. These are two 6-lane freeways at the edge of downtown that are include dint he 100 most busy intersections in the country. The cost to add some lanes and move a few ramps, plus rebuild about half a mile of elevated roadway is over $1 BILLION! If we count every man woman and child in the "greater" area that is considered Birmingham, our population is barely 1 million people. That's spending over $1000 per person on a few miles of freeway. Of course much of that money comes from the federal government, but that's still a lot of money.

We're lucky here that we don't get the deep freezes that wreak havoc on the roads in other parts of the country. Our problem is just that we wait until it's too lat to add roads and lanes. And we have this little river (The Cahaba) that's really not much more than a big drainage ditch, but because it has some sort of endangered fish in it, there is a moratorium on building any new roads to cross it or within a few hundred feet of it. So our problem is not just in road degradation, but not having enough of them. We have people making a 15-mile commute to work that takes over an hour one-way. And of course there are the people in the "richest" areas of town that pay the most taxes.

 

FWIW here in Washington State we have the 3rd highest gas taxes in the nation at 49.4 cents per gallon. For reference California is 38.1 cents a gallon and Alaska is the lowest at 12 cents a gallon.
Then we have extra transportation taxes tied to our annual license tab (vehicle registration). They have raised the gas taxes twice in recent history to help correct for more fuel efficient vehicles and are now toying with the idea of adding a per mile tax, not instead of per gallon gas taxes, but in addition to. It is not at all a lack of revenue, it is how they choose to spend it.

 

I am not really sure how much of the monies collected through gas tax actually go to local municipalities. As for the car tabs this is only to fund the Sound Transit projects. None of this goes to roads.

 

 

The RTA taxes they added on go to Sound Transit but the base excise taxes goes to the state transportation department. The cities get chunks of that money for their own road projects.

 

 

I am ok with paying for something I do not use. But I object to the fact that people who do use it, do not pay at all. No car - no car tab tax.

 

 

 

 

....and I thought California's fuel taxes were outrageous (That's prior to your post above).

Regret your pothole/track encounter.

all the best from circa 39N,



ez

 

 

Sound transit ? And the huge expense etc. Yet years ago they tear up all the rail road tracks from Renton to Bellevue, and from Renton to Maplevalley, oh and don't forget even the nice scenic ones that went over Snoqualmie pass and North Bend!!!! Talk about huge waste, the crooks seem to like spending and taxing everyone and the state or country into oblivion. All those track systems could have been used for passenger commuter trains. But Naaaa its just better to tax more and spend billions on the sound transit joke, that a friend died over.

 

We actually have 2 floating highways. They run parallel to each other about 10 miles apart. Things get pretty Dicey During Storms Stormy 520

Here is another older local public works project that met with a scary ending.