There’s only one way to put this, our roads suck and the local councils seem to take pride having huge pot-holes that claim the lives of motorcyclists in their jurisdiction. There’s no denying it, pot-holes are everywhere and each time someone fills it up, it just happens again. It’s almost as if they filled it up with magic dust that goes soft after a few days, giving them a chance to do it all over again and donate our hard earned tax money to some totally useless contractor to do what he does not know how to do in the first place. Bunch of idiots I say.
I’ve seen countless accidents happen because of irresponsible, ignorant and utterly hopeless local municipal councils refusing to fill up pot-holes and just refusing to do it right in the first place. And what do we car-lovers do? Avoid them at all cost, even if it means slowing down to a crawl and backing traffic up a mile just so we can creep down potholes and creep back up again, anything to keep the wheels nice, shiny and in a perfect circle. What do you think? The local council who we pay taxes to so they can maintain the roads are going to care about our multi-thousand-ringgit rims, our suspension, our aero-kits, basically our entire car? Please, they are more interested in what’s in our pockets.
So what do we do? Trust foreigners of course! Don’t they always come to our rescue? The Indonesians build our buildings, the Bangladeshi’s work our plantations, the Indians and Asians serve us in restaurants, I think I’ve made my point. And now we can thank the Italians. Two Italians actually, university students Domenico Diego and Cristina Corradini who think that potholes need to be more visible. It’s beyond me why no one actually thought of this before but I figured that if someone came up with this idea here, it would just highlight the incompetence of the exact same machinery that was put together to serve us in the first place. So ignorance was practiced instead.
Domenico and Cristina came up with the “Street Safe Initiative” which is essentially a program that wants to take the transportation network to another level by “comparing the road surface to the human skin”. When someone gets a scrape, you see red underneath; Diego and Corradini think the same principle can be applied to roads.
“[The concept] comprises a brightly-coloured layer of asphalt a few inches beneath the surface of the road, which becomes visible when the road surface breaks up, making potholes easier to see and avoid.”
The Street Safe Initiative will be tested later this year in Italy. If it proves cost effective and feasible, the program may be popping up in other European countries and hopefully other countries around the world as well. But like all great ideas, there are those who say it might not work:
Mike Conway Managing Director of FM Conway (a highway-fixin’-and-buildin’ company) doesn’t think it’s realistic:
“It’s a novel idea but it’s not the right solution for the UK right now. To make layers of tarmac stick together we use a bituminous coating that acts as a glue and you’d have to go right back to the manufacturing stage and work out how to make it bright yellow. We should be looking at how to reduce costs by doing the job right in the first place, rather than creating expensive solutions that only have an effect once the pothole is already there.”
Well there are two ways for us here in Malaysia to do this, one is to just do it right in the first place but we have a better chance of having Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, or even Beyonce perform in Malaysia than our municipal councils having enough intelligence to get things right the first time. Secondly, well we could just hand a bunch of guys some yellow paint, a brush and a small pick-up to go around highlighting each dangerous pot-holes, but then again, they may just end up shoveling up more pot-holes and handing out more dirty contracts to dirty contractors to fill up these “life-threatening” potholes. Either way, we car-lovers are screwed.
Source: CarScoop
