If you’re wondering if there are more potholes in your Calgary neighbourhood than last year, it’s difficult to say, but there have been more requests to fix them.

The City of Calgary said they’ve had 4,000 pothole service requests thus far in 2024, compared with 3,400 at the same time last year. That’s more than 17 per cent more calls than last year.

When Ward 7 Coun. Terry Wong was at a recent community clean-up in Mount Pleasant, he expected to be peppered with questions on citywide rezoning. He figured that would be the hot-button topic.

“Surprisingly, it wasn’t. The question I had, most frequently from people that came to the community cleanup was potholes, springtime potholes,” he said.

Wong asked about it during question period last Tuesday (May 7). At that time, Operational Services GM Doug Morgan said they’d received 3,870 requests. He also said they’d filled 5,352 potholes, which was an increase of 10 per cent over 2023.

“Indeed spring is a challenging time for road and pathway repairs,” Morgan said.

“We’re also looking at our service levels with spring cleanup, and other things that we’re doing to see if we can put more resources to potholes and making sure that we’re responding to those requests.

A day later, Chris McGeachy, communications strategist with the City of Calgary mobility unit, said it was nearly 4,000 requests and they’d filled 6,700. The big challenge in the spring is the quick freeze-thaw cycles when the temperature hovers around the freezing mark, he said.

“Obviously we thank Calgarians for reporting them to calgary.ca/potholes and of course, as calls are recorded, we will prioritize our work,” he said.

“That can be based on a number of different things including the road type, traffic volumes, proximity to other potholes.”

Year-round work filling potholes

GM Morgan said the budget for potholes is $6.9 million for 2024. That includes cash for the pathway system as well, which is now under the mobility unit.

“Trying to address those in the same way we do it for road users and cars and making sure we address the problem, but it continues to be a challenge for us,” Morgan said.

McGeachy said that when requests come in, they’re triaged. It’s difficult to pinpoint the turnaround time for filling potholes as it depends on several factors, including weather, other work in the area, and the priority of the roadway.

He said, however, they’re typically repaired within five days of inspection. Citizens can check the status of requested pothole repairs on the city’s website.

Both Morgan and McGeachy said that pothole repair work is done year-round. Last year, road crews filled a record 33,489 craters.

McGeachy couldn’t make any definitive statements on the correlation between Calgary’s deteriorating score on the Pavement Quality Index (PQI), and the appearance of more potholes. 

Last year, Calgary city councillors supported a motion to improve Calgary’s pavement quality, which showed that between 40 and 45 per cent of the city’s pavement was good or very good. It was noted that Calgary had a $550 million backlog of roadwork that needed completion.

“I’m hoping that we can bring (PQI) back up to 50, or the national average,” Ward 14 Coun. Peter Demong said at the time.

McGeachy said there are several pavement projects planned for this construction season, including ones in Whitehorn, McKenzie Lake, Coach Hill and Mount Royal. 

More details on paving projects can be found on the city’s website.