While potholes can cause serious accidents, the fact they’re usually minor everyday annoyances is what makes them ideal fodder for politicians, says Wilson, who studies how psychological factors influence political decisions. “When we’re feeling more pessimistic overall – facing climate change, high inflation, higher interest rates, gloominess that’s followed a global pandemic, we’re more likely to attend to minor annoyances, and find them more annoying.” “We pay more attention to immediate annoyances than future annoyances,” he says, comparing potholes to climate change, a challenge that always seems to be in the future even when it’s in the present. Marc Wilson, a professor of psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, says that potholes are a kind of everyday annoyance that stick particularly firmly in the mind. Most people in this country traverse roads most days, and potholes are on roads, making them particularly obvious. “There’s a pothole getting deeper and deeper under the wear of traffic,” describes an article titled “Colombo St in a bad state” from the Christchurch Star, which could have been published last week, but was actually written in 1929.

“Upset by a pothole” screams a headline from Feilding in 1926. “I’ve never seen the road in such a disgraceful condition,” wrote a correspondent in the Pahiatua Herald in 1899. A quick examination of Papers Past reveals that a fixation on potholes is a national pastime. That said, potholes – and complaints about them – are hardly a new thing. That said, reports of a pothole crisis may be exaggerated: a Waka Kotahi press release earlier this year disputed reports of a record number of pothole complaints, saying the agency had received a similar number in 2022 as the year prior – 351. Potholes can also be caused by sub-zero temperatures, where water expanding as it freezes creates cracks.Īotearoa’s wet summer, followed by a wet winter, has created prime conditions for potholes, which people were possibly particularly reminded of as they drove places during the just-finished school holidays. Once open, the pothole fills with water, which can make it bigger. Once there are cracks in the surface caused by wear, water gets into the base material and washes it out, until the hole crunches open when something heavy goes over it. Rain is one of the main causes of damage to road surfaces. To keep it short: rain ! Roads are made of several layers: the asphalt or chip seal on top, with a base material below, and then the actual soil underneath that. Why are there so many potholes at the moment?

But why are we so obsessed with bumps in the road – and have they really got worse? Concerns about potholes came to a head yesterday as National announced a pothole repair fund as part of its road transport policy.

Chip ingram books