Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at a milestone in the fight against one of the scourges of winter. We’ll also get details on former Senator Robert Menendez’s 11-year prison sentence.
No. 500,000 was the big one. No. 500,001 and No. 500,002 were smaller, and No. 500,003 was smaller still.
They are potholes in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Or they were, until they were filled in by someone who usually has other things to do — the transportation commissioner, Ydanis Rodriguez.
He said the numbering referred to how many potholes had been filled since Mayor Eric Adams took office three years ago.
It’s a theoretical milestone. The count was based on weekly estimates, and the actual 500,000th pothole was probably found and filled a few weeks ago. But time was needed to plan a ceremony, which included speeches from behind a lectern that was shoved aside when the commissioner picked up a shovel and went to work. Like a dentist facing a deepish cavity, he shoveled in just enough asphalt to pack No. 500,000 until it was level with the pavement around it.
Rodriguez said anyone who sees a pothole should call 311. “We promise all New Yorkers if you make a call in reporting a pothole, we take care of that pothole in two days, less than 72 hours,” he said, unless there were complications underground that demanded assistance from other agencies. The Transportation Department said it closes 311 complaints about new potholes in 1.8 days, on average — faster, the agency said, than during the administrations of Adams’s predecessors, Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg.
Rodriguez also said that there are fewer potholes now because the city has repaved nearly 1,200 lane miles a year since 2022. A residential street that has been paved in the last two to five years will generally not develop potholes. They typically take longer to appear, but heavily traveled streets will have them sooner. So will major roadways, where drivers do their best to slalom around suspension-crippling, tire-shredding ones.
In the annual war on potholes, winter weather is the enemy. The freeze-and-thaw cycle ruins roads. Water (carrying rock salt and gunk) runs into cracks in the pavement, where it freezes and expands. The cycle accelerates when the temperature climbs above freezing during the day and drops below at night. The surface of the asphalt breaks, and a pothole is born.
The Transportation Department says it sends as many as 75 pothole crews across the city every day to respond to 311 complaints and what a news release called “requests from local stakeholders.”
Rodriguez hinted at such requests. When he was a member of the City Council, from 2010 to 2021, he said, “I used to be asking D.O.T., ‘Can you take care of this pothole in my district?’”
The jury is out on how bad a pothole year this will be. “We have to take a look at how we are doing after the winter, not during the winter,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University who is the former director of the Rudin Center for Transportation there. But Rodriguez said that after the extreme cold last week and the somewhat warmer temperatures this week, “New Yorkers are probably seeing more potholes.”
Michelle Demme, the digital communications coordinator at Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group that promotes bicycling, applauded “the speed with which they’re addressing these repairs.”
“From what we have seen, D.O.T. does do an impressive job filling them as they’re reported,” she said. “We hope to see that same level of urgency and efficiency applied to the bike lane network, which affects cyclists every day.”
She spoke from experience. Three months ago, she said, she hit a pothole while biking on Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn where there was no bike lane. “I had to go across that pothole,” she said. “I had no other reality to choose because of how cars were blocking me in.” She said her PCL — the posterior cruciate ligament, in the back of her knee — was torn. Two weeks ago, she was able to walk again, “more or less, if you call it walking,” she said.
As for repairing potholes, the city manufactures about half of the asphalt it needs to fill them and repave roads; it buys the rest from nearby suppliers. The asphalt the city makes contains recycled material — asphalt that was taken from streets that were milled before repaving. Irena Nedeljkovic, the deputy commissioner of roadway repair and maintenance, said that recycled asphalt accounts for about 40 percent of the mixture the city’s two plants produce, twice the national average for recycled road material. She said the plant was “looking to push the numbers to 50 percent and higher.”
The city says that using recycled road material cuts costs and emissions. It also reduces the amount of asphalt sent to landfills. The Transportation Department said it had used more than 256,000 tons of recycled asphalt in the pavement it produced last year.
Weather
Expect sunny skies with a high near 37; wind will make it feel colder. Tonight, there will be a chance of rain, with temperatures in the upper 30s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect through Feb. 12 (Lincoln’s Birthday).
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Former Senator Robert Menendez is sentenced to 11 years in prison
“Every day I’m awake is a punishment,” Robert Menendez, the disgraced former senator from New Jersey at the center of an audacious international bribery scheme, told Judge Sidney Stein.
Menendez, who was convicted last year, wiped away tears during his sentencing hearing on Wednesday as he asked Stein to “temper your sword of justice with mercy for a lifetime of duty.”
The judge sentenced him to 11 years in prison. “Somewhere along the way — I don’t know where it was — you lost your way,” Stein said. “Working for the public good became working for your good.”
It was a humiliating end for a once-powerful senator. The sentence was shorter than the 15 years that prosecutors had asked for, but long enough for Menendez, 71, to face the possibility that he will spend much of the rest of his life behind bars.
Menendez told Stein that he planned to appeal his conviction. Outside the courthouse after the sentencing, Menendez made what appeared to be an appeal to President Trump, who has the power to pardon him. The president has given no indication that he would consider doing so for Menendez, a Democrat who was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he was indicted 16 months ago. He resigned from the Senate in August after a jury in Manhattan convicted him of trading his political clout for bricks of gold, a Mercedes-Benz convertible and stacks of $100 bills.
METROPOLITAN diary
Sounds of the ’60s
Dear Diary:
I was taking an uptown express to the Upper West Side. A trim, older man with a well-worn accordion got on at 34th Street.
He immediately jumped into a set of ’60s rock classics. Man, he rocked. Among the highlights was his version of the 1966 Rolling Stones hit “Paint It Black.”
As we both prepared to get off at 96th Street, I gave him a nod of approval and put some money in his cup.
He grinned and rushed toward the uptown local that was waiting across the platform.
He said, “96th Street, ‘96 Tears.’”
— Chris Parnagian
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Hannah Fidelman, Natasha Cornelissen and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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