Finally, our long city nightmare is over. No, not the homeless, lack of affordable housing, Barry Zito, or hipster beards, but potholes-- lots and lots of potholes. To deal with them, the city is planning to spend $38 million to fix some of them.

Potholes have became our big pet peeve lately-- you can’t get anywhere without being jostled in every which way. Every time we drive down Franklin we're afraid we're going to hit a hole and not come up. And trying to avoid them gets dangerous because swerving to avoid them usually involves swerving into other lanes, never a good thing. Seriously, we think everyone in the city could agree that the Streets of San Francisco look like Edward James Olmos' face in HD. And hating on potholes isn’t just for drivers, but bikers too (it, however, appears to be a good thing for lawyers). Anyways, there’s a statistical measuring stick for the condition of the roads here in the city (we believe the formula is miles of road divided by number of potholes times amount of coffee accidentally spilled on people’s laps). In 1998, the city received a score of 78 out of 100. In 2005, the rating dropped to 64 out of 100. The DPW estimates that there’s the equivalent of 2,262 city blocks that need fixing, at an estimated cost of $427 million bucks to fix.

The city's plan is to work on eleven major streets and some smaller, neighborhood streets over the next few years. Those streets planned to be de-holed include Seventh Ave to Lincoln Way, Folsom Street in SOMA, Bush Street, Cesar Chavez, and a bunch of other roads. As any driver knows, that’s only the tip of the iceberg and even the Powers that Be admit that the amount of money being spent won't even be close to fixing what needs. The money will come out of the gasoline tax and not the city budget.

And while they're at it, can somebody please start working on 101? You could build a condo in some of the holes that line that highway.

Photo by geekstinkbreath/Flickr