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It may look small, but is it?

A pothole is a pothole, right? That might be right and wrong at the same time. Everyone, at some point, has watched a pothole get bigger and bigger over time. We are so desensitised to the point that we’ve even learned to dodge one. You might take it as just a gap in the tar, but a pothole is more than just a little oopsie. A tyre drops into it at speed, and it stops being a minor thing. What starts as a bump you barely notice can end in a blown tyre, a bent rim, or a driver losing control entirely, and the gap between annoying and dangerous is smaller than most people assume.

What a pothole actually does to your car

The damage is rarely limited to a scuff. Hitting a pothole hard enough can blow out a tyre, crack a rim, or knock your wheel alignment out completely, sometimes without any obvious sign until you notice your car pulling to one side weeks later. South African drivers deal with this often enough that the AA now offers a dedicated Pothole Damage Assist service, which says a lot about how common this problem actually is on our roads.

The swerve is often more dangerous than the pothole

Here is the part people underestimate. It’s hardly the pothole itself that causes the accident. It is what a driver does to avoid it. A sudden swerve into another lane, into oncoming traffic, or into a cyclist who had no warning it was coming turns a road maintenance issue into a genuine emergency in the blink of an eye. A pothole does not need to touch your car to cause a crash. It just needs to make you flinch at the wrong moment. It just needs to exist, and that alone is enough to cause more harm and pose danger to drivers and even pedestrians.

Who pays when a pothole causes an accident

This is where things get a little interesting. South African law does allow drivers to claim against the responsible municipality or road authority when poor road maintenance causes an accident, although proving negligence and getting a payout is its own long process, and not something anyone wants to be dealing with after the fact. Prevention is a far better use of your time than a claims form and that waiting period that comes while officials investigate.

Report it before it catches someone else

You cannot personally fix every pothole between home and work, but you can make sure the right people know it exists. The iER App lets you report potholes, damaged road signs, and other hazards straight to your municipality through its Infrastructure Reporting feature, so the next driver has a better chance than you did. It takes less time than complaining about it in the group chat, and it might just stop someone else’s ordinary Tuesday from turning into a case number and an insurance claims process.

Download the free iER App today and do the five-second version of being a good citizen.