Vinay Menon: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rod Stewart are now filling potholes as our cities decay

“For three weeks I’ve been waiting for this hole to be closed.”

That’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger quote. But it’s not from an action movie in which he’s sent from the future to battle liquid cyborgs or bratty kindergartners spilling out of a glowing portal in the space-time continuum.

The quote is from real life. The quote is from this week.

It seems Mr. Schwarzenegger — actor, former governor of California, bodybuilder with ageless limbs the size of sequoia logs — is like the rest of us in two crucial ways:

1. He is frustrated by the molasses speed of municipal services.

2. He really hates potholes.

So after watching in creeping despair as a crater wreaked havoc on cars and bikes in his Los Angeles neighbourhood, he hit up a Home Depot. Then in brown leather jacket and Terminator shades, he morphed into an asphalt vigilante.

Hasta la vista, mangled tar. I’ll be back … to clean up later.

In a video shared on Tuesday, Schwarzenegger dumps a bag of Quikrete — whatever that is — into the motorway chasm. He gingerly levels it out with a shovel. As he tweeted: “I always say, let’s not complain, let’s do something about it.”

I applaud this take charge, can do spirit. But I also know jacksquat about DIY. If I’m ever falsely charged with a heinous crime, I pray the detectives seize my tool box as evidence. They won’t find my fingerprints on any of that stuff.

But Schwarzenegger wasn’t installing a floating bookcase or digging a koi pond. He had slowed traffic with orange pylons to MacGyver a “giant hole” that looked more like a military trench. When a passing motorist stopped to give thanks, he described the overall situation as “crazy.”

It reminded me of a similar story last year when Rod Stewart donned a neon vest to repair a road near his home in England. I don’t know what happened to that poor street in Harlow. But my money is on earthquake or cluster bomb.

As Stewart noted, an ambulance had blown a tire in the Swiss cheese pavement. That was the least of it: “My Ferrari can’t go through here at all!”

This guy has sold more than 120 million records. He has the resources to travel by private chopper. No matter. Potholes do not discriminate on any socioeconomic basis. They torment us all. Potholes had got inside Sir Rod’s head.

It would be swell if Elon Musk stopped screwing around with Twitter and put his mind to inventing an indestructible road surface. But until that happens, we are stuck driving when suddenly — snap, crackle, pop — an extracted molar under the rims snags and bounces our cars while bending axles and scraping underbellies.

According to its website, the City of Toronto has already repaired 53,392 potholes this year. It’s only April and I can provide GPS co-ordinates to another 100,000.

This is why we need more threats of celebrity DIY in our atrophying cities.

It’s not that Schwarzenegger or Stewart should be allowed to build bridges. Nobody wants to see Kim Kardashian installing guardrails on a highway. Celebrities do not have the patience to abide by code and safety protocols. There are liability concerns. But after getting sick and tired of snafus in their decaying cityscapes, what celebrities can do is get personally involved and then shame municipalities into overdue action.

That’s what happened with Stewart. A few weeks after he warbled songs while filling potholes, the local government dispatched pros to fix his messy fix.

Now that road is pristine for all ambulances and Italian supercars.

This week’s Schwarzenegger situation is different. It’s possible the “giant pothole” was something else. Elena Stern, a public works official, told NBC News it was actually a “service trench that relates to active, permitted work being performed at the location by SoCalGas, who expects the work to be completed by the end of May.”

Arnold is lucky he didn’t cause an explosion and wipe out the Hollywood sign.

But you know what? Now every bureaucrat within a two-hour drive of Brentwood is focused on that road. There are probably workers with pneumatic tampers on site as I type this. That is the power of shaming when dished out by celebrities.

So why aren’t Canadian stars rolling up their sleeves and taking matters into their own hands for all of us? This city has more potholes than Indonesia has coconuts. Overworked 311 operators can only do so much when Joe Nobody reports a hole.

It gets tossed in the queue. It is often forgotten.

But I can tell you right now, if Drake was spotted in a helmet and construction boots clumsily pouring Quikrete into an abyss on Avenue Road, every available city worker with a power tool would converge in an hour to fix the problem or least ensure the superstar didn’t accidentally cement himself to a hydro pole.

And if this celebrity shaming works, why stop at potholes?

Get Seth Rogen to use his pot head to solve cell service in the subway. Ask Justin Bieber to reimagine garbage collection. Ryan Reynolds? Do you have strong feelings about libraries or traffic signals? Sandra Oh, we need your input on sewers.

Exasperated celebrities have started filling potholes?

If that finally helps cities wake up, someone hand Pam Anderson a shovel.

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