Junior Diane Jackson said she hates driving in Muncie.
Jackson, who received a new car for Christmas, said she avoids driving "her baby" at all costs, but that's hard to do.
"It's depressing when I have to drive because I'm always worried something is going to happen to my car," she said.
Jackson said she is concerned about the damage that Muncie's potholes could do to her car.
Every year potholes reappear on roads when water seeps into the pavement's cracks, freezes and thaws, reeking havoc on unsuspecting cars, Street Department Supervisor Brian Cole said.
"We've been patching for the last two and a half weeks," he said. "It's a continuous process through the whole year."
The Street Department crews first patch the roads they consider the most traveled, and they move to secondary streets and last to the neighborhood streets, Cole said. McKinley Avenue, which runs through Ball State University's campus, is considered a secondary street.
The Street Department has an agreement with Ball State that says the university will plow the snow off McKinley Avenue instead of the city, Cole said. Because of the agreement, the Street Department workers aren't aware of the conditions on McKinley Avenue compared to the other roads they do plow.
Kevin Kenyon, associate vice president of facilities planning and management, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
He said that the section of McKinley Avenue by the duck pond as well as the area north of the intersection of McKinley and Riverside avenues would be patched today or Monday.
To fill in the potholes, the work crews use a temporary substance called "cold patch," which is replaced later in the spring by a more durable type of filling.
Each crew uses between six to eight tons of cold patch per day at a cost of $57 dollars per ton.
"What we have done up to this point has been staying in really well," Cole said.
The Street Department has 17 repair crew members for the city, Cole said. Currently, one or two crews, with four workers per crew, pave roads each day.
Normally, Cole said, at least three crews go out to pave but because of the recent ice storm, the Street Department has been helping the Sanitary Department with tree limb clean-up.
Cole said that even with the ice storm, compared to last year, the potholes aren't as bad. He said this was probably because the Streets Department repaved 22 roads last year at a cost of more than half a million dollars.
If there is a pothole that needs to be fixed, Cole said people should call the Street Department and let them know.
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