Seattle has been crazy with the road work. Denny way is all torn up for freakin ever.

I'm also amazed at the amount of construction downtown.

My GOLEM!!! Noooooooo! Noooooooo!

Did they pave your street with chip seal (a spray of bitumen covered with compacted crushed rock) or is it just a layer of rock on the road. Doesn't really matter. Even with chip seal you can expect six months of loose gravel piling up on the side of the road.

I noticed the city paving with chip seal in the north end about seven years ago in the Greenwood area. I do not know if it is part of a cost cutting measure for paving or if it is in some way related to salmon preservation in the Thorton(?) Creek watershed (I have heard references to permeable asphalt).

In any case the stuff sucks.

They did the same thing in the Greenwood neighborhood several years ago. I assumed it was for repaving. The cars press the gravel down instead of the pavers. Lazy or genius, I do not know, but that's all that happened.

Chip sealing fucking sucks! For bicylists, it is like riding through molasses, even after the 6 months of cars-throwing-peanut-sized-shrapnel at your legs, torso, arms and face. Wear eye protection!!! I used to live in a place where all new paving was chipseal, it is a disaster. See @3 for technical description.

Yeah, Chip Seal is Nickel's wonderful solution for cheap road work. AND little rocks everywhere.

Can we impeach Nickels already? He really is a fuck up!!

The city’s description of the chip seal process can be found here.

Chipped seal? This is an outrage! Where's PETA?

It's used all the time in Eastern WA/Northern ID. I suppose it's a step up from dirt...

Some other joe: Chip seal is not the same as permeable asphalt. Chip seal is an inexpensive albeit messy way to add a few years life to a road, and is cheaper than a full overlay of pavement.

Permeable pavement is an expensive solution for installing a new road or walkway but the cost of the special pavement is far less than the cost of all the required drain pipes, detention ponds, and water quality treatment measures that are usually required.

It is only used in special cases right now, due to the initial expense and the special installation methods required. But its use is growing.

Awesome. I just have to applaud the golem person and the chipped seal contributor. Bravo.

You can't blame Nickels for chip seal. They've been using it for ages. I remember when I was in high school, they repaved my street with lovely smooth black top (I used to roller skate down my hill, so the black top was awesome), then showed up a week or two later and chip sealed on top of it, turning my street from a smooth heavenly skate to a tooth-rattling, jarring, painful experience. Even with the softest wheels I could find, it was pretty much unskateable -- and that was after the cars had smushed the gravel down for a couple of months. Grrr.

Of course, many other neighborhoods continued to get nice pavement, but the area I lived in at the time got crappy chip seal, and no sidewalks to boot.

come on spanenthal, you are a shoreline pretender to the thrown if you haven't been through this before.

Oh that's right, you don' have proprer city credintials.

Chip seal is used all over, not just Seattle. As previously described, it's an inexpensive maintenance solution. Public Works budgets are tight. The alternatives are either let the roads fall into disrepair (for cars and bikes) or raise taxes for a more expensive ashpalt overlay.

"raise taxes for a more expensive ashpalt overlay"

Lets do that one.

But hey, after a bit of traffic, all the hard edges are worn down, so instead of hard bumps, they're soft bumps. wheee...

@13-

Born and raised, man. I've just managed to avoid chip-seal up till now.

chip seal is cheaper than new concrete, and it placates the asphalt & gravel pit lobbies.

with the pitiful condition of most seattle streets & the skyrocketing cost of construction, ANY construction, you should be grateful you're getting anything for your doubled property taxes. all i get is view-blocking spec homes.

We DID raise taxes to pave the roads. Bridging The Gap anyone? If I have to ride my bike on this crap I'm gonna go apeshit!

So basically chip seal is like shoe-goo for roads; cheaper than buying new shoes, but also kind of pointless and ineffective.

Fnarf and I can tell you it is "Thornton"

Thank you, KT, for sticking up for that neglected "n".

Shoreline? So who are you complaining about? Greg Nickels doesn't have anything to do with Shoreline. If you want to live out in the woods, you're going to have to expect some rusticality.

As for Greenwood, the reason they don't do a proper paving job there is because the whole damn place is a sinkhole, and there's no point spending a lot of money on good asphalt just to watch it disappear. I see they're building some condos in the old Hancock/Shop'n'Save parking lot; they're probably going to have to build it on pilings.

Fnarf @22: Maybe they'll just suck the water out of the underlying bog, and every building within 5 blocks can sink another few feet.

Yeah, they proposed a pretty big renovation of that area (just east of Fred Myers) a couple years ago. It'll be some serious gentrification of an area that I assume hasn't been gentrified because of the problems created when the ground randomly sinks from time to time. I too wonder what they're doing to deal with that...

That said, I grew up in Island County when pretty much every road was chip sealed. As a skater with no car it really sucked. The only roads you could skate on were the oldest most worn down ones and even those would make your feet go numb. I'm pretty sure that at certain downhill speeds the vibration would make you hover about 1/2 inch off the board, which wasn't ideal for obvious control reasons.