Auto Insurance
Where are Potholes the Largest Problem in New York?
Whether you travel by bike, bus, cab or car, New York City (NYC) can be a treat to navigate — so long as its roads don't muck up your ride. But New Yorkers have grown accustomed to dealing with all sorts of travel obstacles, including street defects, such as cave-ins and potholes.
NYC's Department of Transportation (DOT) reported that it repaired 460,493 potholes on streets, highways and bridges in 2015 alone.
NYC311, the city's call center for nonemergency services, receives more than 60,000 service requests annually from concerned residents who want roadway potholes fixed. But where are potholes racking up the most complaints? We analyzed NYC311's service requests for pothole repairs handled by the DOT from 2010 to 2018 to find out.
Key takeaways
- Staten Islanders take a pummeling from potholes compared with the other boroughs, leading runner-up Queens by 121 percentage points in monthly complaints per 100,000 residents .
- Many roadway locations have seen repeated service requests over the past eight years, thanks to reopened potholes. Approximately 29% of all repaired NYC potholes became damaged enough to warrant additional service a year or more later.
- Nearly half of all service requests are for stubborn potholes that have reopened a year or more after the initial fix.
From where do most pothole service requests come?
Although a hefty number of service requests come in for potholes on some of NYC's busiest streets, such as Broadway, Ocean Parkway and Third Avenue, these complaints are proportional to their heavy vehicle and foot-traffic volumes. We decided to highlight pothole-plagued regions by taking the local population into account, starting with the five boroughs.
Residents of NYC's southernmost borough, Staten Island, are complaining the most about potholes. This borough leads the rest of the city in monthly service requests/ complaints per 100,000 residents by 121 percentage points over the runner-up, Queens.
Pothole complaints by NYC borough
We also performed a more granular mapping of service requests. We calculated monthly complaints per 100,000 residents by NYC ZIP code and ranked them.
Pothole complaints by NYC ZIP
Boundaries with increasingly larger monthly complaints per capita are shaded darker. The financial district near Battery Park (10004) in downtown Manhattan ranked worst for monthly pothole complaints per capita. Little Neck in Queens (11363) and Midtown West in Manhattan (10018) placed second and third. All of the rankings can be viewed by hovering over the ZIP code boundaries in the embedded map.
How many potholes have seen repeated complaints over the years?
There are many problem sites across the city as a result of "stubborn" potholes. We wanted to estimate how many of these sites had received repeat complaints over the past eight years, signifying potential repeat repairs. To do so, we measured time spans between the first and final complaints for a given location and grouped them into year-count categories.
A surprising 29% of all pothole locations have received repeat complaints after one year or more, with 1.4% of these locations having been a nuisance to NYC residents for more than eight years. Because pothole patchwork doesn't hold up forever, the DOT must service some sites over and over again.
Complaints by pothole age
The graph shows the average number of complaints per pothole location, according to the number of years between its initial and final service requests within 2010–2018. Using the total number of potholes in each category, we were able to estimate that around 50% of all complaints are for potholes that have reopened after the initial fix.
The price of a pothole
Potholes occur when groundwater freezes and thaws beneath the pavement, making winter the ideal season for pothole formation. The American Automobile Association (AAA) reports that potholes cost drivers nationwide $3 billion each year in damages, which comes out to roughly $300 per unlucky driver. Fortunately, in NYC, drivers who have damaged their vehicles on potholes can file a claim to be reimbursed for damage by the office of the New York City Comptroller. Drivers are responsible for providing proper details about the incident, such as the date, time, location and contributing factors, as well as a list of damaged parts and the estimated repair costs.
Pothole collisions can be serious, potentially damaging your steering, suspension and alignment systems. If your vehicle has sustained damage from a pothole or similar street defect, you should check with your auto insurance provider to see whether the damage is covered.
Methodology
We analyzed publicly available data on 311 service requests from 2010 to 2018 regarding pothole repairs handled by NYC's DOT.