This U.K. machine can repair a pothole in eight minutes

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Soon — but never soon enough — spring will be upon us. With the change of seasons will come the bloom of flowers, the return of sunshine, and, with the melting of snow from our roads, potholes. The inevitable, never-conquerable, seemingly endlessly-renewing pothole. Potholes too big to avoid, too numerous to steer around, and too damned costly, it seems, for governments to fix, despite the carnage they wreak on motorists’ rims and tires. Every year Canadians complain. Every year city hall says there’s nothing that can be done about it.

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A British company called JCB begs to differ. It has, the company claims, developed a single machine that can, with but one operator, repair a pothole in as little as eight minutes. Eight minutes a pothole. If it weren’t for travel time, that would be six or seven an hour. About 60 or so in a day. More than a 100, if you gave one to the night crew as well.

Now, I am not a civil engineer — my B. Eng. being mechanical — but I don’t think anyone needs higher learning to figure out that that’s a lot quicker than a typical Canadian work crew takes. Like the snowflakes that cause them — potholes are caused by the expansion of freezing water below the asphalt’s surface — no two potholes are the same, but a video produced by JCB shows compares a job that took almost two hours with a crew of four using a jackhammer and shovel to a similar rut that took the Pothole Pro just 13 minutes. And that’s with the aforementioned road crew working at we’re-on-camera-boys speed, not union-work-to-rule pacing.

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Nor is this rapidity of road repair some “throw and roll” tossing of hot asphalt into a crevice and then rolling over it with something heavy. Indeed, the Pothole Pro is the master of the long-term fix, performing all the tasks that Ontario Asphalt Pavement Council (OAPC, formerly the Ontario Hot Mix Producer Association [OHMPA]) deems necessary for robust repair to road irregularities. First, a 600-millimetre wide planer cuts out all the asphalt around the hole. Then, a hydraulic cropper cuts the entire area into a nice, square grid (the better to fill the divot evenly, and to make any subsequent repair easier). And lastly, a sweeper — with built-in dust suppressor, no less! — brushes the surface to be repaired completely clean, something the OAPC says is absolutely essential to rugged repair. Said brush also collects all the loose asphalt, helping reduce the mess and providing material for recycling. The only thing it doesn’t do is actually fill the whole with “hot mix” and then roll it flat and hard. But then that really is the easy part of the job.

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JCB says that that the Pro can rebuild such 12-square-metre areas in as little as eight minutes and can — this time including moving locations — perform about 20 such road resurrections in an eight-hour shift. Better yet, despite costing upwards of 165,000 pounds — CDN$270,000 — the company says that Pothole Pro can reduces the per-pothole cost of repair by as much as 50 per cent.  

And the repair is longer lasting — if anything about Canadian road repair can indeed be durable — than other such “automatic” pothole fillers might be. For instance, both Toronto and Ottawa made a big splash testing an automated paving machine by Python in recent years, but that machine just tosses new asphalt into existing potholes without the chopping, cropping and brushing mentioned earlier. It also rolls the hot material flat, which makes it a quicker process than the Pothole Pro, but without the preparation, the repair may not be as robust.

Whatever the case, I can’t think of a jurisdiction in Canada — be it city, town, or just the regional road repair crew — that would not benefit from having a Pothole Pro on the job. Lord knows there’s going to be even more work to be done in a couple of months. So far, sales of the Pro have been limited it the U.K., but JCB says that the accolades coming from existing customers are encouraging it to broaden its horizons. I’m as big a proponent of fiscally conservative budgeting as any man, but I’d be all in for having a Toronto mayor John Tory authorize the purchase a few of these hot rods.