TIL that the bike lane on 109 Street has a huge crack that messed up my tire last Tuesday

I was riding home from work around 5 PM and hit a crack near the university crossing. My front tire went flat in about 30 seconds and I had to walk my bike six blocks to the shop on Whyte Ave. The repair cost me $28 because the rim got bent too. Has anyone else reported this spot to the city yet?

3 comments

3 Comments

leo_kelly20d ago

Yeah @elizabeth_king nailed it with calling the hotline. I hit the exact same crack on Thursday last week, same spot near the university crossing, and my rim got bent too. Cost me $34 at the shop on 99 Street because the tire kept losing air after I rode on it flat. The online form is useless for this stuff, I reported a pothole on 82 Avenue last month and it took three weeks before anyone even looked at it.

elizabeth_king20d ago

Call the city's road maintenance hotline directly instead of just using the online reporting form. In my experience, the online system gets buried and nobody follows up for weeks, but if you call and get a service request number, they have to respond within 48 hours by law. The 109 Street bike lane is technically a "major collector route" in the city's infrastructure plan, which means it gets priority for repairs over residential streets. I've reported three potholes on this same stretch over the last year and the only one that got fixed within a week was the one I called in about. The crack you hit might be part of that ongoing utility trench settlement problem they've been ignoring since the water main work last fall. Just a heads up though, keep your service request number handy because sometimes they'll close the ticket without actually fixing it.

skyler_mitchell15d ago

Woah, $28 for a bent rim? That sounds more like the shop saw you coming than the city's fault. I've hit plenty of cracks on my bike over the years and never had a rim bend unless I was already riding on a low tire or hit something way bigger than a crack. Are we sure this isn't just bad luck or maybe the tire needed replacing anyway? I mean, I get that potholes suck but a single crack taking out your rim sounds like a stretch unless you were going pretty fast or the tire was already worn down.