Learning from the best: Chicago-style road repair in Germany

From our Whining with the Stars series.

Driving in Chicago used to be so much fun. You'd be on a nice, smooth street, then a light rail bridge would appear ahead, and the drivers in front of you would step on the brakes at the underpass.

The road surface under the rail bridge would invariably look and feel like an artist's recreation of the pockmarked surface of an asteroid.

You have seen the photos: That jagged jumble of rocks and loose stones and dust resulting from millions or billions of years of collisions in space, shown on NASA space probe pictures with the invariable "awesome" or "fantastic" in the tag lines.

An close-up of a stretch of street under an L overpass in Chicago could be substituted for the asteroid photo, and nobody would notice the difference.

The city said the land under the overpass was the responsibility of the transit system.

The transit system didn't care. Why should they? Fix the streets so that people would have an even greater incentive to drive instead of taking the train?

Well, the phenomenon is international! We have the same, minus the train overpasses, in our neck of the woods in Germany.

A small town just down the road underwent some road repair recently. The condition of the main street in town was pretty bad, bad enough in fact for us to rejoice when a detour sign appeared at the start of what we nicknamed Pothole Alley. Four days later, the signs had disappeared, and we happily took a right as before.

In anticipation of a smooth new street, we were going about 40 km/h (about 25 or so), when the car suddenly bucked like a mechanical bull. 

Adrenaline, brakes, a prayer!

It all happened so fast, so we are not sure about the prayer, but we were down to the usual 20 km/h within a few meters. 

WTF?

As we swayed, rumbled and bumped towards the town limit, we thought of Chicago. A yard past the yellow sign that marks a town limit in Germany we were on a brand new blacktop.

Laughter drowned out the music on the car stereo.

The Germans had put a new blacktop on a stretch of road we had previously marveled at for its smooth and unblemished surface!

I kid you not.

Pothole Alley has not been touched.