There's a scary one not far from my house. After this past week's snow and ice, this baby is big enough to swallow a Honda Insight or a large house pet. [1/28/9: see update below.]

View Larger Map I've marked it on this collaborative map. Why don't you open up the map and mark the locations of your pet pothole, too? If you want to add a pothole, you must have a (free) Google (Gmail etc) account.

While you're looking at the map, log into your Google account, and click the Edit button next to the map. Then drag the map to the locale of your pothole.

Click a placemark icon in the top left corner, drag it to your pothole spot, and drop it. Replace "Placemark x" label with streetname. Type in the descriptive details. Click Done, and your pothole has been added to the map.

If you can't mark it on the map, let me know in a comment below where your bad pothole is.

Mine is on Damascus Church Road in southern Orange County, at a dip in the road that always has standing water after a rainfall. Hence its perennial potholiness.

[Wed 1/28/9: After last week's snow, this became a gaping hole maybe 16 inches wide, 5 inches deep and a few feet long. This photo was shot Sunday.

[On Monday, NCDOT's Orange County maintenance crew patched this big hole in response my e-mail request. But by Tuesday, the patch had failed! The hole had returned!

[Wednesdy morning, this part of the road was covered in standing water.]

Call it in

City and state road crews split the job of pothole patching. If you happen to contact the wrong folks, they’ll relay your message to the right place. ... [MORE]

There’s still a buzz lingering from an extraordinary exit interview Lyndo Tippett gave last week after stepping down as Mike Easley’s state transportation secretary.

To hear Tippett tell it,

“DOT is in the best condition it has ever been in its 75-year history. Our improvements over the past eight years are manyfold.”

Really?

If you believe Tippett, it wasn’t DOT’s fault that North Carolina had to shell out $22.4 million to rip out 10 miles of bad concrete on I-40 in Durham County.

Tippett told WRAL-TV’s Bruce Mildwurf that the other big screwups weren’t DOT’s fault, either.

On the clogged interchange of I-540 at I-40 near Research Triangle Park, Tippett says ... [MORE]:

Is it my imagination, or did the Triangle just grow a bumper crop of potholes?

Let me know about your pothole encounters. Please include details, and your contact info.

A federal stimulus package moving through Congress would give North Carolina about $900 million for new road, bridge and transit projects — and that’s just a few drops in a leaky bucket.

Dwindling receipts from gas and car sales taxes will cut state transportation revenues by $300 million a year for the next three years, state Transportation Secretary Gene Conti told a House-Senate oversight committee today.

“That $900 million from the federal government sounds great,” Conti said, “but ... you’re kind of just breaking even, if you want to look at it that way.” ... [MORE]

Tomorrow, the forecasters say, we'll move like tigers on vaseline. Leftovers from today's snow will freeze when temps drop below 20 tonight, returning by daybreak as nasty black ice.

“When there’s a wet snow you can get some traction, but tomorrow we expect it to be frozen solid," says Capt. Everett Clendenin of the State Highway Patrol.

"You just cannot get traction in these types of conditions. So the best advice we can give is don’t drive unless you absolutely have to."

The forecast as of 4pm Tuesday: Overnight low 17, high Wednesday 35. There'll be nothing melting before midday. 

NCDOT road crews will be out between 6 and 7 a.m. with their salt trucks and plows. DOT had about 450 people clearing major roads in its seven-county Division Five area Monday night and today.

Two interstate highway paving blunders mark the Easley-Tippett legacy at NCDOT: bad concrete on I-40 in Durham County and, now, bad asphalt on I-795 between Wilson and Goldsboro.

Next week Bev Perdue and Gene Conti will take charge of a DOT that has been staggered over the past eight years by twin deficits in finance and credibility.

The bungled paving job on I-40 cost DOT $22.4 million in repairs — and more in lost political capital. A new report from the Federal Highway Administration says I-795, North Carolina's newest interstate, also needs a major repave that will cost $14 million to $22 million.

DOT had no defenders in 2007 when Gov. Mike Easley ridiculed its “absurd” warning (from his own appointees) that anemic gas and car sales tax collections would fall $65 billion short of North Carolina’s road and transit needs over the next 25 years. . . . [MORE]

Business leaders have high expectations for their e-mail service and their technology gizmos -- but not so much, unfortunately, for the road system they need to get their goods to their customers, says corporate VP Jerry Cook of Hanesbrands Inc.

"We do not hold our highway infrastructure performance to the same standards as our information technology infrastructure," Cook said today. He appeared in Raleigh on a panel of corporate types who talked about the high cost of bad roads, at a session sponsored by the N.C. Bankers Association and the North Carolina Chamber.

NCDOT should not take its customers for granted, he said.

"If your phone doesn't work, you change phone companies. If the interstate system [in North Carolina] doesn't work, you're going to change interstate systems. And you're going to move somewhere else, where you can have predictability."

Cook and other speakers said NCDOT must become more transparent and reliable in its dealings with business and political leaders, and more trustworthy to voters who will be asked to pay more taxes.

Meanwhile, Governor-elect Bev Perdue was introducing her pick for DOT secretary, Gene Conti.

"I want to ensure the people of North Carolina that we will be open and honest," Conti said. "I am simply not comfortable doing business any other way."

If I-85 north of the Triangle is your highway, driving for the holidays just got easier.

NCDOT said today it has finished the latest phase of repaving work that had closed lanes and caused backups on I-85 for months in Vance County between Oxford and Henderson. 

All lanes are open, northbound and southbound. More work and more lane closings are planned for March 2009. 

Who let the horse out of the barn? That’s what Andrew Perkins Jr. of Greensboro, a member of the state Board of Transportation, wanted to know.

At a board meeting this week Perkins said he was satisified with how the state Department of Transportation responded to a critical audit and review by the Federal Transit Administration.

But he didn’t like seeing a newspaper story published before DOT had a chance to put the best face on its problems with the feds. He chided DOT for the bad press.

A DOT administrator explained that he had felt an obligation to answer questions from a News & Observer reporter. And a DOT lawyer politely schooled Perkins on the workings of North Carolina’s open government laws. . . .

Grants worth $25 million for local public transportation services across the state are still frozen because North Carolina — alone among the 50 states — has not yet convinced federal officials that it will manage the money properly.

[Update 12 noon Wednesday 12/10: Feds release state transit grants]

State Department of Transportation officials will have two opportunities at public meetings in Raleigh Wednesday to explain why the Federal Transit Administration took the unusual step of freezing grants that were tentatively approved in September.

“Withholding funds is a tool FTA uses sparingly,” the FTA said by e-mail. Tia N. Swain, an agency spokeswoman in Washington, provided the FTA statement this week in response to questions from The News & Observer. . . .