For those who live in snow-prone regions, driving in the winter can feel like an exercise in futility: Unsuspecting, and then it appears, a crater in the asphalt, just waiting to blow out a tire. You try to swerve, brace for impact, and then: Kathunk.

But commuters of America, take heart: Indianapolis has it worse.

Much, much worse.

The capital of Indiana (whose state motto is, ironically, “the crossroads of America”) has essentially become one large pothole, compliments of wild temperature swings this winter. The metropolis is so pockmarked by decaying asphalt that local officials have said that more than $730 million is required to repair more than 8,100 miles of streets — nearly six times the city’s current budget for transportation infrastructure.

Decades of neglect and underfunding, combined with the brutality of Midwestern winters, have left the city’s roads resembling the surface of the moon. To assist motorists, the city last year posted an “Indy pothole viewer” map online, which currently shows 4,388 open potholes, marked by a swarm of angry red dots.

In Des Moines, Iowa, the city fills about 7,000 potholes a year. And in Chicago, which recently emerged from a brutal few days of subzero temperatures and where snow is forecast for five out of the next seven days, the city received just shy of 4,400 pothole complaints from residents in January.

With little relief and plenty of new craters on the horizon, residents in Indianapolis have taken it upon themselves — and taken to social media — to vent, warn and meme.

On a Reddit thread tagged with the headline “The pot hole problem, and how to solve it,” residents suggested legalizing and taxing marijuana to pay for road repair and more mass transit. And then there’s Quinn Daily, a young man who turned his frustration into civic participation of questionable legality. In a YouTube video titled “Dear Indianapolis,” Daily used a can of red spray paint to outline potholes at a particularly treacherous intersection, doing his “best to help drivers avoid hitting the holes and breaking their car like I have.” (Spoiler alert: “Literally too many holes for me even to paint,” he says.)

The Instagram hashtag #indypotholes is a seemingly bottomless well of mirth (and, ahem, schadenfreude) for a city plagued by crumbling roads. Chris Bucher, a local photographer, turned the pits and cracks into action-flick landscapes.

In the Facebook group Indiana Pothole Haters Club, users lament the sorry state of the state’s roads while hoping to “Make Infrastructure Great Again.”

But perhaps the award for social media savvy goes toa Twitter parody account that tries to set the record (if not the street) straight by letting people see things from the point of view of those beleaguered, naturally occurring phenomena themselves: the @PotholesOfIndy.

For the past year, the self-described “pothole advocates” have been doling out a steady stream of taunts and mockery. “Here to ruin your daily commute,” the account warns. “Think twice before you think about reporting us. Nobody likes a pothole NARC.”

In December, @PotholesOfIndy waded into the upcoming mayoral race by, um, endorsing the city’s incumbent mayor, Joe Hogsett, who has tried with limited success to vanquish the pothole menace.

“No community has benefitted more from Mayor Joe Hogsett’s policies than us potholes here in Indianapolis,” declared the account in a statement. “We started out as a minor bump in the road but now we have total control of the city.” The endorsement concluded with an offer to assist the mayor’s campaign, “whether it be by causing car damage” to his political opponents, “swallowing school buses whole, or endangering the general public on their daily commute.” (The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

The account is the handiwork of two men who said in an interview that they were spurred by their shared outrage at the state of their city’s streets, not to mention weekslong delays in repairs. Fed up with what they called a history of municipal mismanagement, they were surprised by the account’s popularity with residents, who over the past year have tweeted instances of car damage and road havoc, including a large sinkhole that formed in July.

“It’s uniting the city behind our frustrations with the potholes,” said one of the men, who asked not to be identified to retain the anonymity of the account. “We’ve joked we’re bought and paid for by big tire.”

To be fair, cities across the country and the globe (here’s looking at you, Rome) are suffering from pothole infestations, and social media provides a glimpse, at once gritty and beautiful, of all the asphalt melodrama.

There’s Potholes of Philadelphia, which lavishes a reflective touch upon the city’s watery pits.

Potholes of Detroit, however, is decidedly less artful in its depictions of the former industrial powerhouse’s perilous craters, conveniently accompanied by specific intersections. “What a shame,” is a familiar comment on the account’s posts.

Down south, the potholes of New Orleans and Atlanta have each merited their own Instagram accounts, though their silence of late might suggest a lack of dedication to the social media cause, rather than a significant public works victory. Still, it’s not for lack of trying.

“Atlanta potholes beware,” @potholes_of_atl warns. “We’re coming for you.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.