Filling Indianapolis potholes after 'years of unfunded roads'

It's a simple question with a complicated answer: Why does Indianapolis have so many potholes?

Dozens of the city's true villains met their end Friday morning at the hands of one of the Indianapolis Department of Public Works crews. Five men — one to control traffic, one to drive the truck towing a machine that keeps hot asphalt mix from drying and three filling, smoothing and tamping down the holes — went hunting through several residential streets on the near eastside.

Crews like this were busy in February, when the city received its first seasonal shipment of the material they dub "hot mix." The warm material will chemically bond with the road in order to fill a pothole and is preferable to "cold mix." The former is only available when asphalt plants are open, typically the non-winter months, while the latter is basically what someone could buy at a hardware store.

More: Indianapolis announces plans to throw its 'best response' at city's multiple potholes

"We are dealing with a deficit — years of unfunded roads," DPW spokesman Corey Ohlenkamp explained as the crew moved forward along Bancroft Street near 16th Street. He said the Transportation Capital Fund was $79 million in 2017 and $284 million in 2024.

And that's still not nearly enough.

Why not repave Indianapolis roads?

The teams respond to public requests for pothole filling made through the Mayor's Action Center phone line, 317-327-4622, or the RequestIndy app. They are one arm of the city's road response, which can also include repaving, rebuilding a road entirely or fixing road drainage problems to prevent future issues.

As a thought experiment, Ohlenkamp tabulated how much it would cost the city to simply repave every road — an idea commonly floated on social media.

At a cost of $63 per foot on 8,400 lane miles, it would be roughly $2.8 billion to "fix" Indy's roads. And that's not factoring the logistical nightmare of closing every street to traffic and somehow locating thousands of engineers and construction crews to do the work.

"There aren't enough teams in the world to do that," Ohlenkamp said.

The figure doesn't take into account that some roads require rebuilding underneath the pavement, which would add more time and money. Rebuilding — not just repaving — a residential street can take two or three years from proposal to design to engineering to road work. Larger city streets are an even larger project.

Statehouse issues

There are also political factors at play.

The city has long argued against the state's road funding program, which does not take multiple-lane roads and traffic into account. By its math, Indianapolis receives funding for 3,400 lane miles despite having 8,400.

A two-lane road in a 10,000-person town gets the same funding as Pennsylvania Street in Indianapolis.

State lawmakers have not yet found a compromise that would satisfy both rural and urban areas, with Republican leadership also floating the idea of increased local taxes for areas with bigger road needs.

The weather

Central Indiana's penchant for erratic weather doesn't help, either.

Potholes are formed when water gets into cracks in the road, expands during freezing then contracts during thawing, Ohlenkamp explained. Forty-degree temperature fluctuations — of which Indianapolis has seen several of this month — are perfect pothole makers.

More: Pothole season is (unfortunately) here. How to report them, how long they take to repair.

So far, 2024 has been worse than 2023 in that regard, Ohlenkamp said.

Snow also has a practical impact, as the same work crews filling potholes are those plowing snow.

With all of those factors swirling overhead or through governmental offices miles away, the crews march on. One man shovels in the hot mix, another rakes it smooth and a third tamps it down — hundreds per day citywide, thousands per week and so on.

A man driving by asked why the crew was redoing the road but did not stick around for an answer. Ohlenkamp told IndyStar the road will likely need residential repaving. Because the crew's assignments are generated by public reports, it's not often known how light or heavy a job will be.

Some streets have a few cracks, and others like Bancroft are more hole than asphalt.

This week will mark 101,000 potholes filled and about 6,500 of 8,200 service requests fulfilled so far in 2024. It's progress, at least until the next storm push the figurative rock back down the hill.

Rory Appleton is a reporter at IndyStar. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on X, formerly Twitter, at @RoryEHAppleton.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indianapolis potholes: Here's how city fixes each pothole