Bitter cold, heavy snow the ‘perfect recipe for potholes’ on Toronto roads this year
Driving through Toronto in November has never been so treacherous – a new study is suggesting.
And the city’s road crews have a lot to do.
A new report has shown that the city’s snowfall data were out of date by a year.
It also found that the city’s road crews were putting themselves at a “substantial risk” of being attacked.
So, here’s what you need to know about winter driving in Toronto in 2019:
The problem with winter driving
As the first snowfall of 2019 fell on Saturday, December 4, it was still only December 3, according to the University of Toronto Transportation Institute’s Climate Change and Environmental Change department.
By the following day, things started to turn around and the snowfall increased to 5.9 cm, or around 14 inches, over the weekend.
That is not good enough for a winter road.
Winter in Toronto is notorious for potholes, as well as the icy roads and slick conditions you encounter when the snow melts.
“What happens is during the winter you have a lot of snow,” says Andrew Gieschen, a professor at U of T’s Transportation Institute.
“Then the pothole problem goes full-force.”
The most serious potholes in Toronto are known as ‘potholes of despair’ and are called such because they are so deep and dangerous to drive through.
A typical one is about 10 x 10 feet in size.
The problem is that winter potholes are more common than they used to be, and they are harder to fix.
“We’re using snow to patch up potholes before they’re filled by ice,” explains Gieschen. “But there are too many potholes today, so we try to patch up as many as we can.”
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