My Goal is to Make Crack Sealing as Simple as Laying Down Tape.
Hey DIY Community, I’m here for feedback and input on how to get people to give an ounce for their roads and driveways. If the walls in your home suddenly cracked you would probably be concerned. You might wonder if the integrity of your wall or home was sound. You might not feel comfortable having guests in your home with a cracked wall. You would take action to figure out what’s going on and repair it, right? Yet when we have cracks in our driveways we just ignore them.
The reason I’m passionate about road maintenance is that I have an old school long-term view of roads. As symbols I think roads are more inspiring than walls. There are so many expressions related to roads that have positive attributes. Expressions like: All roads lead to Rome, Get the show on the road, Take the high road, Blaze a trail, Get back on track, It’s an open road, Fast track it, On the Road, Why don’t we do it in the Road, Beauty is in the streets, etc… There are many negative road idioms as well but wall idioms are predominantly negative. For the most part roads connect us whereas walls divide us. Yet we put more care into our walls than our roads. I keep banging my head on the wall when it comes to this. I think that one reason is that people don’t think they have the power or knowledge to repair roads. I want to change this. I want people to feel comfortable and at ease when it comes to road maintenance. Traditionally road maintenance has been done by marginalized groups like the Irish Travellers and Gypsies. If we look around the world we see the road maintenance can be a transformative force for social groups. In Asia a number of efforts have been made to organize women’s road maintenance groups. Can we in the U.S.A. aspire to caring for our common infrastructure as communities? We get so much joy out of using our roads let’s put some love back into them as community groups. Roads can give us agency.
From a World Bank Initiative:
“ Agency, the ability to speak up and make choices in life, is key to improving our own lives as well as the world around us. “Roads to Agency: The Effects of Enhancing Women’s Participation in Rural Roads Projects on Women’s Agency,” a comparative assessment of projects in Argentina, Nicaragua, and Peru, shows how rural road construction and maintenance projects can promote and enhance women’s decision-making power and aspirations, as well as challenge social norms — an important step toward giving women an equal voice and equal role in societies and households.”
A Portland based effort by a community group called City Repair brings neighbors together to paint dangerous intersections, ‘street painting’, with the intent of slowing traffic. https://cityrepair.org/street-painting-examples/
Maybe I’m thinking it over too much. What I should probably target is straight up curb appeal. Whether you’re conscious of it or not when you come up on someone’s property the driveway is usually the first thing you make contact with and take in. If the driveway is well kept you are more likely to start with a positive experience of someone’s home. If instead you roll up on a pothole you’re more likely to think this person doesn’t really care about their home. So what do they care about? Maybe I’m being too hard on people? After all, sealing a driveway crack or patching a pothole may seem like a lot of work to people. I have two products that I sell currently one is a burn-on tarr tape the other is a self-adhesive tarr tape. You can see them under “supplies” at pavemade.com I’m thinking starting a campaign called ‘fix it today’ would love any feedback or ideas that would motivate people to care more about repairing damaged asphalt and concrete.
