You know what they say… If something’s broke, fix it! (Okay, that’s not what they say, but you get the idea.)

But if something is broken specifically in a road, you really should fix it. Not only are potholes annoying, but they are extremely dangerous and can sadly be found everywhere. You think you are driving along a nice, smooth road and then all of a sudden — wham! — your tire is sunken into a big gaping hole in the Earth. No one likes it.

To clarify, potholes are “the result of water in the underlying soil structure and traffic passing over the affected area.” There are about 55 million of them across America — and they definitely exist in every other country, too.

Unfortunately, people have to keep driving to get where they are going. What needs to be fixed in this situation is the pothole.

As a solution was beginning to feel impossible, one very impressive man by the name of Israel Antonio Briseño Carmona came along to fix things.

He hails from Mexico and was particularly frustrated with how bad the roads were in his area, so he came up with an idea that eventually earned him the James Dyson Award. It is an international student design award that “challenges young people to design something that solves a problem.”

He was inspired to find a solution to this problem because there are so many potholes in Mexico. He is a student at Coahuila Autonomous University located in Saltillo, Mexico.

“I was inspired to solve the problem that every time it rains in my city pavement gets damaged and it takes a lot of time to maintain a damaged street.”

So, he came up with the idea to have the pavement regenerate itself with rainfall. While the student admits that he was not the first to come up with this idea, he is the first to incorporate tires.

“At present, there are already pavements that regenerate — but none use water as a means of regeneration … much less made of tires.”

Basically, the tires are supposed to melt into a putty (there are some other additives as well). Then the rainwater acts as the catalyst and is what sets the regeneration in motion. When it rains, “the water spurs the road mixture to form calcium silicates that repairs itself.”

When you think about it, this process makes way more sense than what we are currently doing. Right now, we are building roads just to have them ruined by bad weather, and then we build them again. Why do that when we can use the bad weather to help strengthen the roads instead?

Eventually, Carmona would like to to start his own construction company, then they will take this idea all the way home. He split it into three phases.

“The first phase involves meeting with an engineer to “resolve doubts” about the project and then building a short section of road to ensure that it functions as envisaged. The second phase is to certify the construction system with the national building certification organization ONNCCE and the third phase is to gain approval from the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation.”

Fingers crossed that it works well, then we can implement this new invention all around the world!

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Source: Shareably