Toronto is ramping up its fight against those pesky potholes by placing additional crews on extended hours throughout the month of May.
The city typically has about 25 crews out filling potholes on any given day during the winter, but often focuses its efforts on the weekend to avoid impacting traffic.
Mayor John Tory says the next few weeks will be different, with about 25 to 30 crews working to fill potholes Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
“This is an unprecedented extension of hours for a large number of crews that will be out doing this,” Tory told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday. “We simply have to break the back of this and make sure that we do that in the interest of safety for drivers and cyclists, and also in the interest of the protection of property, because of course these things can cause damage to people’s cars.”
He said the harsh winter and subsequent freeze-thaw cycle has done significant damage to many of the city’s roads and, in some cases, reversed work done in advance of the late-April ice storm.
A portion of the Gardiner Expressway in the vicinity of Exhibition Place will be one of the first areas crews hit. Tory said the area has fallen “into a state of disrepair” as a result of the turbulent weather.
“We are not stinting on repairing roads, we are not stinting on the kind of asphalt that is used – people often have theories that somehow the record number of potholes are caused because we bought cheaper asphalt,” he said, adding that he is “not concerned” with the cost to the city’s budget.
“We are using a quality of asphalt that shouldn’t cause problems at all. It’s just one of those things where we had a really bad winter and it caused really bad results for people and now we have to deal with the consequences of that.”
The city has filled 133,852 potholes so far in 2018 compared to 96,222 in the same period last year.
According to Tory, the City has received reports from residents about 1,195 potholes that need to be filled but he says not all have been reported.
He urged residents to call or email 311 and identify places where attention is needed so crews can work to repair the holes within four days of receiving the complaint.
“We need to know where more of these potholes are because we have the crews now on the extended hours to fill them,” he said. “We have the 1,195 on this map that we know we have to fill but we need to know where more of these locations are.”
