This scene takes place in South Richmond Hill on 118th Street and 103 Ave.

In the middle of the road yeah.

This is not infrastructure maintenance, this is a meme

I remember when this slowly collapsing sinkhole was just a baby back in Mid-August…

 

 

There are more pitiful asphalt patches here than a pair of hippie bell bottom pants. All these cracks indicate that it’s going to reach a full cave in the not so distant future. It’s a mystery who put that plundered shopping cart there, but it was a yoeman thing to show how deep the crevice is.

 

All signs indicated that current mayor de Blasio’s Department of Transportation, which is run by one of his Brooklyn aristocrat city planning buddies Hank Gutman, did a major less than half ass job laying the blacktop on this. Because this is what it looked like a week before some creative type did a near approximation of Homer Simpson’s rage motivated contemporary art piece.

Truly a WTF FUBAR in process.

Apparently the DOT got some 311 calls and filings and sent some workers to remove the shopping cart the following day and marked the territory in orange spray paint and placed less damaged but not really new hazard cones to warn approaching drivers coming from both sides and from the north.

Another day went by and those poor cones couldn’t survive the rigors of traffic, so de Blasio’s D.O.T., or more likely some local denizens took matters into their own hands again to salvage the dreaded sinkhole and filled it with cobble stones and a strip of aluminum siding.

 

 

 

 

 

Noice!

Although this is another embarrassingly abominable display of city neglect and incompetence and another example of the city infrastructure dilapidation, this will eventually be remedied with a better and hopefully more thorough renovation, because this evolving crater is not to first to infect 103rd Ave. For their were similar former and potential cave-ins discovered on numerous blocks west from this current blight.

Both examples were found on only 2 blocks away on 116th, with one recently blanketed over in the intersection and the other that is certain to collapse in probably a week or a day.

Another dilapidated touch up found on 115th.

Surrounding cracks for this shit job between 114th and 113th shows this asphalt comb over will fail soon

More dilapidation on 112th St.. The jagged double yellow stripe indicates that they didn’t even wait for the asphalt to dry when it was painted over.

Same case with this baby on 107th Street as well.

 

Crossing the border into Ozone Park at 102nd St.  is where the last of the asphalt wonder chasms got the shit as extra frosting treatment. But it’s obvious that vehicular wear and tear is having an effect.

The contractors sure were in a rush to steam roll this hole by the look of the detritus that got stuck in the tar.

Can’t recall the last time this avenue was milled and repaved but it doesn’t look that long ago. But there’s still something disturbing going on here to see these many chasms on consecutive blocks and not so far apart on one avenue in just two zip codes. Especially an avenue that is only about over a mile and a half. (It’s about 50 blocks running from 84th to 134th). It’s even more infuriating that as this avenue continues to turn to shit and is most likely to lead to injury or fatality if the ground just gives way as someone is driving over it, that the city is prioritizing building fucking “bike boulevards” and designating and blockading “open streets” for Queens cycling colonizers to play on.

Here’s a good example of one of these open streets on 34th Ave. in Jackson Heights (where a massive inferno engulfed an apartment building, disenfranchising over 400 people from their homes), what the current mayor and bike taliban agitprop news site Streetsblog calls the “gold standard” of returning streets “back to the people”.

Good luck finding the people.

 

With Speaker Cojo the Derelict Dancing Clown and the City Council Cronies and a pandering and weak NYC mayor hiring a fellow Brooklyn patsy like Hank Gutman to run the D.O.T., this confederacy of dunces and douches exerted more effort into open streets and now bike boulevards for self-serving enlightened bike and “open space” lobby groups, they abandoned the rest of the streets in deeper enclaves of Queens, streets that are necessary for commerce and personal livelihoods. Also got to mention all the new bike lanes they painted that doesn’t do a fucking thing to keep pedestrians bikers, drivers and even the environment safe. But the dirty underlying reason why 103rd Avenue is decaying is that it’s part of the city’s neoliberal plan to induce demand into people to give up their cars, their choice to commute. And what better way to do that to use hostile redesigns like keeping open streets closed to vehicles and using demolition by neglect to let the streets crack and collapse below them, and certainly local cyclists and pedestrians too. But I guess they will all just be collateral damage to satiate the self-righteousness of these fauxgressive politicians and social media urbanish gadflies.

Sure it sounds conspiratorial, but this is how NYC government has been operating for the last decade, notably under Bloomberg’s illegal third term and through 8 years of slow water torture governing by the Blaz.

On the way back to South Richmond Hill, there was a hole on the street I rode past over by 112th St. and sure enough it’s the same protrusion I caught on 118th back in August. It’s a sure bet that this will progress into something bigger, but at least it will lead to more inspiration in an effort to conceal it.

From the looks of this little weed, this cave-in is already alive.

Meanwhile, back on 118th St., Autumn equinox:

The siding is destroyed, the road hazard cones are gone, but more cobblestones have been dumped in the hole to convey the illusion of infrastructure road remediation.

Keep safe while driving Queens…