Pothole tire damage in Dallas

A pothole strike does its damage in a fraction of a second, and most of what it breaks is invisible from the driver's seat. The tire that looks fine at the kerb can be finished. The tire with a scuff in the tread can often be saved. You cannot tell which is which by looking, and neither can anyone else.

Dallas has its road-damage season in spring, not late winter

This is the part that surprises people who moved here from a freeze-thaw city, and it comes straight out of the city's own 311 archive.

Pothole service requests to Dallas 311, summed over the five full years 2021 to 2025, by month of submission:

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2,719	2,974	3,644	3,604	4,063	3,755	3,024	2,769	2,466	2,331	2,521	2,395

May is the peak and October the trough. The four-month block March to June carries 15,066 of the 36,265 requests logged across those five years, which is 41.5 percent of the year in a third of the months.

For scale, the whole dataset holds 42,694 pothole requests between 1 October 2020 and 20 September 2026: 849 in the part-year 2020, then 6,085 in 2021, 5,218 in 2022, 7,165 in 2023, 9,089 in 2024, 8,708 in 2025 and 5,580 to 20 September 2026.

Two honest caveats. These are complaints, not potholes, and they are not adjusted for population or road mileage. And we are deliberately not telling you why the peak falls in May: the timing is measured and solid, the cause is not, and we would rather leave a gap than fill it with a story. What the shape is good for is knowing when to look at your tires, which is before and during spring rather than after the first cold snap.

Where the complaints cluster

Ranked by street name over the 28,308 of those 36,265 requests whose address parses cleanly as a numbered Dallas street address, 78.1 percent of the total: Ross Avenue leads with 376, then Preston Road 303, Military Parkway 231, Inwood Road 210 and Lemmon Avenue 201. Mockingbird Lane is split across two entries in the data, and adding the 169 on West Mockingbird to the 123 on East Mockingbird gives 292, which would place it third. That ranking covers the parsed subset only; the other 7,957 rows carry intersection, block-range or non-Dallas addresses.

By ZIP over the same five years, the top of the 68 ZIP strings present: 75217 Pleasant Grove 1,811, 75206 Lower Greenville 1,680, 75216 South Dallas 1,611, 75214 Lakewood 1,558 and 75228 Casa View 1,549. By council district, District 2 is highest at 4,211 requests, 11.6 percent of the five-year total. If you live in one of those, Pleasant Grove, north Pleasant Grove and Buckner and Lower Greenville have the local detail.

What the city says about its own streets

Dallas paves in concrete, and says so in its own manual. The City of Dallas Street Treatment Selection Manual of 1 June 2021 states: "All new streets in the City of Dallas are concrete streets unless approved otherwise by the Director of Public Works", and puts asphalt-over-concrete at "approximately 15% of the City Streets".

The same manual is candid about the pace of repair: "In a typical year, the City improves around 5% of the roadway network, leaving the remaining 95% of the streets to deteriorate." Street condition is surveyed by van only every four years, "because of the cost of the work".

And the city's Five-Year Infrastructure Management Program FY2024-FY2028, published January 2024, puts a number on the gap: "a budget of approximately $266 Million will be needed every year for five (5) years to maintain zero degradation on the current City's overall network condition", against a stated "Street Maintenance FY 2024 Investment: $141.0M".

That is the city's own arithmetic, and it is the reason the spring numbers above are not going to improve on their own. Report the hole when you hit one; it is free, and it is how the next car is spared.

What to check after a strike

Pull over somewhere safe and look at the wheel you hit on, then at the other three.

A bulge or bubble in the sidewall. The internal belt has separated and the tire is done. Nothing in a sidewall is repairable under the US Tire Manufacturers Association standard. A bulge in the sidewall and a bubble in the tread cover what they look like.

A cut or a pinched line low on the sidewall. Same answer.

A bent or cracked wheel. Alloy wheels crack rather than fold. A tire that starts losing air after an impact with no mark on it anywhere is very often the rim rather than the tire. Tire losing air with no nail in it covers the rest of that list, and slow leak repair in Dallas covers the diagnosis.

Nothing visible, but the pressure is falling. Impact damage hides inside the casing. Finding it means demounting the tire and inspecting the inner liner, which the repair standard requires before any repair anyway.

The car pulling, or a new vibration at speed. That is suspension or alignment, and we do not do alignment. A humming or roaring that changes with speed helps sort a tire noise from a bearing.

The timing trap in Dallas

Spring damage and summer heat are two different seasons here, and they barely overlap. The 311 complaints run March to June; the heat runs late June to early September, and July, August and September are the 311 trough at 3,024, 2,769 and 2,466 requests.

So a tire that took a hit in April and kept holding air goes into the hottest part of the year with damage inside it that nobody has looked at. In a state with no safety inspection since 1 January 2025 and no tread standard in Section 547.612 for a passenger car, nobody is going to look at it later either. That is the case for getting an impact checked while it is still April. Summer blowouts in Dallas is what the other end looks like.

Getting the car back on the road

We supply and fit replacement tires where the car is parked, so a car with a wrecked sidewall does not have to be driven anywhere first. The price is online in minutes, with no callback, no estimate visit and no separate call-out fee. We need legal, level, paved ground with room to work around one corner of the car.

If the damage turns out to be a repairable tread puncture rather than a write-off, we repair it instead and say so. If it is unrepairable, the inspection is charged and the repair is not.

We do not sell used tires and we do not fit tires bought elsewhere. Repair or replace a tire covers the call, replace two or four covers how many, find your tire size covers what you are buying, what tire repair costs in Dallas covers the local published numbers, and our Dallas service area covers where we come.

Our price: $145

A mobile puncture repair on one tire is $145. That is the price, not an estimate and not a starting figure. It covers getting to you, the wheel off, the tire demounted and inspected from the inside, a plug and patch fitted the way the tire industry requires, remounting, rebalancing, a TPMS reset where the vehicle supports it, and the wheel back on. If the damage turns out not to be repairable, we tell you on the spot and you are not charged for the repair.

Questions people ask

• When is pothole season in Dallas? Spring. Dallas 311 pothole requests summed over 2021 to 2025 peak in May at 4,063 and bottom out in October at 2,331, and March to June carries 15,066 of the 36,265 requests, 41.5 percent of the year.
• Why does it peak in May? We do not know, and we are not going to invent a reason. The month-by-month shape is measured from the city's own 311 archive; the cause is not established in any source we could read.
• A bulge came up after I hit it. Can that be repaired? No. A bulge is a separated belt, and no sidewall damage is repairable under the US Tire Manufacturers Association standard.
• The tire looks fine but keeps going down. Often the wheel rather than the tire. Alloys crack on impact and leak with nothing showing on the tread. Both possibilities need the tire off the rim to confirm.
• How much of the Dallas network gets fixed each year? The city's own Street Treatment Selection Manual says "in a typical year, the City improves around 5% of the roadway network", and its Five-Year Infrastructure Management Program puts zero-degradation funding at about $266 million a year against a stated FY2024 street maintenance investment of $141.0 million.
• Do I have to get it checked if it still drives fine? Nothing in Texas requires it. Non-commercial safety inspections ended on 1 January 2025 and the Transportation Code sets no tread depth for a passenger car, so an impact you ignore in April is one nobody else will catch before August.