Why Kansas City gets so many potholes

A pothole starts with water

A road is a layered structure: a relatively thin asphalt surface riding on a base of compacted gravel and soil. The surface carries traffic and keeps water out of everything underneath. A pothole is what happens when it stops doing the second job.

The Missouri Department of Transportation describes the process plainly in a February 2022 advisory: moisture from rain and snow "seeps into cracks and joints in the pavement and later freezes." Ice takes up more room than water, so the pavement bulges and bends. When it melts, it leaves "gaps or voids" in the surface and in the structure beneath it. Then traffic finishes the job — cars and trucks rolling over the weakened spot flex it until chunks break loose.

Freezing isn't the only way water does damage. Soil and gravel that stay saturated lose much of their ability to hold weight, so even without ice, a wet base lets the surface sag and crack under every passing tire. That's why potholes cluster where water collects: along gutters, in low spots, at worn joints and seams.

And every crack is an invitation. Older pavement has more of them, and it has become more brittle with age and sun exposure. Anywhere the surface has been cut open and patched — for a water main, a gas line, a manhole or valve cover — adds a seam where water can get in. When KCUR examined newly resurfaced streets in May 2025, the problems it found included utility valve hatches sitting lower than the new asphalt and gaps between the pavement and the curb where water pooled.

Kansas City's weather is almost built for it

What matters most for potholes isn't how cold a winter gets. It's how often the temperature crosses the freezing mark, because each crossing is another round of water freezing, expanding, melting and seeping deeper. A place that freezes in November and stays frozen until March is, in pothole terms, gentler than a place that bounces back and forth all winter.

Kansas City bounces. To put a number on it, we counted the days in NOAA's daily temperature record for Kansas City (the long-running "Kansas City Area" record, retrieved through the Regional Climate Centers' ACIS service; the official observing site has been Kansas City International Airport since 1972) on which the high was above 32°F and the low was below it. Over the 29 complete winters from 1991–92 through 2019–20, Kansas City averaged 74 of those freeze-thaw days per winter. The fewest was 49; the most was 94.

They're spread across the heart of winter: roughly 17 in an average December, 16 in January, 15 in February, and 11 each in November and March, with a few more in April. That's a freeze-thaw cycle about every other day for four months.

Air temperature is only a stand-in — pavement warms in the sun, and a freeze-thaw day does no harm without water in the cracks. But wet snow, then a thaw, then rain, then another hard freeze is exactly what potholes need. KCUR described that sequence in January 2024, when a snowstorm and a week of bitter cold gave way to rain and melt, and City Manager Brian Platt said the city had received 600 pothole reports to 311 in a single week.

What the city's 311 data says about pothole season

Kansas City publishes every 311 service request on its open data portal — the same dataset this site's map is built on. Counting pothole reports by month shows the season clearly.

One wrinkle: the city changed how it files pothole reports in late 2023. Reports before then were logged as "Street Maintenance – Pothole"; since December 2023 most are logged as "A Pothole," though about a thousand more used the old label during 2024. The table below adds the two together so that full years can be compared. Counts are 311 reports, not individual potholes — one hole can draw several reports, and plenty are never reported at all. (More on what this data does and doesn't measure.)

The pattern is consistent. March was the busiest month in three of the four years, and January through April together account for 57% of all reports. The four months from September through December combined draw about 13% — fewer than March alone.

The exception proves the rule. In 2024 the peak came early, in January and February, which lines up with the late-January freeze and thaw KCUR and KSHB covered that month. Pothole season follows the weather, not the calendar. This year has followed the usual shape so far: 2026's busiest month through August was again March, with 983 reports.

Why does the peak come at the end of winter? Because damage accumulates. Each cycle loosens the pavement a bit more, and the holes open up as the thaw arrives and snow melt and spring rain soak the base. The long decline through summer and fall is the city catching up while the cycles pause. For charts of the same data, see the analytics page.

Data pulled September 10, 2026 from the city's 311 dataset (d4px-6rwg) using SoQL counts grouped by year and month of open_date_time, for issue type "A Pothole" plus issue type "Street Maintenance" with sub-type "Pothole." 2021 is left out because the dataset begins in late February 2021.

Why the same pothole keeps coming back

If you've watched a hole get filled and then reopen a few weeks later, you've seen the difference between a cold patch and a permanent repair.

Proper asphalt is laid hot. The hot mix used for lasting repairs doesn't work in freezing weather, so during winter crews use cold mix: a patching material they can shovel into a hole straight from the truck and pack down. A January 2016 KSHB report on Kansas City's winter crews explained that winter repairs use temporary cold mix because hot mix would crack in the freezing temperatures, and that permanent repairs come in spring. MoDOT says the same about state roads: cold asphalt for short-term fixes, with long-term repairs needing warm weather — and it does most of its patching from late February through the end of April.

A cold patch fills the hole; it doesn't fix whatever let water in. If the base underneath is still wet and weak and the edges of the hole are still cracked, the next freeze and the next few thousand tires work the patch loose. That doesn't make patching pointless. Federal Highway Administration research summarized in "A Better Fix for Potholes" (January 2000) found that the quick "throw-and-roll" method, done with good material, held up about as well as a more elaborate cut-and-square repair in most situations — and that 56% of the patches it tracked were still in service at the end of the multi-year study. Material quality mattered more than technique.

The permanent fix is resurfacing: removing the cracked top layer and laying new asphalt, which closes the entry points water was using. On a street that's failing all over, it's the only fix that sticks.

How Kansas City handles it

Kansas City, Missouri's Public Works Department handles both jobs: patching and resurfacing. By the city's own count the network is large — Public Works Director Michael Shaw put it at 6,400 lane miles in an April 2025 KCTV5 interview, while the city's Street Preservation Program page describes "around 6,000." (A lane mile is one lane, one mile long, so a four-lane street a mile long counts as four.)

Patching. In that same interview, Shaw said patching is the only way to promptly handle the thousands of potholes that appear after snow season, and that crews were working 12-hour shifts, six days a week, in a push expected to take six to eight weeks. During the January 2024 surge, Platt told KCUR that ten crews were working 12-hour shifts.

Resurfacing. The city's longer-term bet is to repave more streets rather than keep patching failing ones. In March 2023 Platt told KCUR that, absent a safety issue, badly deteriorated streets would be put "on the list for rapid addressing with street resurfacing" instead of being patched over and over, and that the city was using an imaging system that photographs every street to decide where to go next. KCUR's 2025 reporting described the 0-to-100 scale the city uses to grade streets and match each one to a treatment, from crack sealing to a full resurfacing.

Shaw told KCTV5 that the city had resurfaced more than 1,500 lane miles since 2021 — about a quarter of the network — and that the city's 2022 Asset Management Master Plan had shortened the resurfacing cycle from roughly 40 years to between 12 and 15. The city's Street Preservation Program page says Kansas City expects to be more than 40% resurfaced by April 2027.

Budget. For the 2026–27 fiscal year, KCTV5 reported on March 24, 2026 that the city council's finance committee added money to a proposed $30.9 million resurfacing budget, bringing the total to nearly $40 million, with a goal of about 300 lane miles of work.

Resurfacing also waits on what's buried underneath: Shaw said the city coordinates three- to five-year plans with utilities so a new street isn't dug up right after it's paved.

Where 311 fits in

Resurfacing is planned from street surveys, but patching still runs largely on reports. A pothole report to 311 becomes a service request routed to Public Works' street crews — in the public data, those records are assigned to the "PW Streets" work group. That's why a specific, well-located report matters, and why it's worth filing even if you suspect someone else already has. Here's how to report one so it gets found.

If the hole is on an interstate or state highway, it may not be the city's at all — see who maintains Kansas City's roads. For how long reports take to close, see pothole repair times. If a pothole has already damaged your car, start here.