Popular Mechanics wants to know and needs your help. Popular Mechanics says:
We're calling on all readers to submit their worst local road to us via email at pmwebmaster@hearst.com. All submissions must include your name and email contact info, plus several photos or video showing just how bad your road is, location info (GPS coordinates or mile-marker designations for the worst 1-mile stretch) and a short description of the road's condition. All nominated roads must be state-level or above (no private roads), paved (well, there must have at least been an attempt to pave it at some point), within U.S. borders (sorry, Canada) and neglected for the last several months (no attempts to fix the damage). To be clear, we're not looking for roads that have been wrecked by some sort of natural disaster; we're searching for roads that have fallen into disrepair through prolonged governmental neglect.
Once we've reached a critical mass of submissions, we'll narrow the field down to the top five, then hit the road with our diagnostic equipment and a bunch of spare rims to drive these horrifying routes for ourselves. Then we'll work with National Instruments' engineers to crunch the data and publish our results in a future issue of PM. There's no official prize, unless you count the satisfaction of holding your state officials responsible for shoddy maintenance. So get out there and take some pictures, then send us your county's most embarrassing stretch of asphalt.
