Niagara Falls streets are improving, using a little money and some new machines.
Mayor Paul Dyster says the city will be spending $2.5 million this year on street repairs and renovations, as Niagara Falls continues to dig out from years of neglect and an accumulation of potholes of national recognition.
Dyster says it's bad for the tourist industry when visitors wander into a residential area and find decrepit streets. Dyster adds residents are pushing for improvements in their neighborhoods.
"I think the interesting switch in the psychology is that we are now fielding complaints from people in a particular neighborhood, maybe on the last street to be paved," says Dyster.
"We at first would get kudos for paving one street out of five in the neighborhood. Now, we are getting people wondering when we are coming to pave that, the fifth and last street in a particular neighborhood."
Dyster says a lot of the work is routine milling and overlaying or old-fashioned dig it all up and start from scratch construction. Some work requires a machine called "the pothole killer" and others use "the zipper" to put the streets back into shape, the kind of shape which doesn't wreck a car front end.
