Potholes, UK roads

have you ever actually been to the highlands?

tbqh, champ, this is not a topic that you want to personalise.

the council just said ‘it can’t be done because of health and safety’ and cancelled the resurfacing job. Maybe if you had invested in the right equipment for the size of UK roads…

In a previous job, I was (peripherally) involved in the consequences of a guy being killed on a highways job. It was very unpleasant for everyone involved, but particularly for his wife and kid. You can assume that someone at the council and contractor has thought very carefully about whether the road needs to be closed in both directions.

You can assume that someone at the council and contractor has thought very carefully about whether the road needs to be closed in both directions.

Haha, yeah right.

With zero consideration for sending heavy traffic down completely inappropriate minor roads that are themselves dangerous with eroded edges.

Can we officially take the position that a tyre profile of less than xx is not fit for purpose for the UK’s roads? It would be fun just to see the reaction on pistonheads.

I find it strange that with all the terrible stuff happening in the world, potholes seem to cause such anguish to so many

Tyre profile shouldn’t make any difference, and in any case, there is a legal responsibility to make sure roads and road surfaces are fit for purpose. Cycles and motorcycles are particularly vulnerable, and people can be seriously injured and killed. A mate was lucky to escape serious injury after he came off his motorbike on his way home from work. First on the scene was an off-duty police motorcycle officer, who took control, did all the checks and helped my friend get home. He came round a few days later, and reassured my friend that he’d done nothing wrong, in fact the police officer often rode that road, and he considered himself lucky the same hadn’t happened to him, because the gritted surface had worn away, leaving bare, smooth tar, and my mate’s tyres had lost grip and dumped him on the road. He’d been doing about 50-ish, all his bike gear was trashed, including his gloves, his helmet was practically worn through, and his nearly new Honda 600 was written off. Just because of inadequate road maintenance.

The road outside my house is appalling, it’s just an urban road but it carries a lot of traffic, including fire engines when they’re on a shout to the south, the surface has been broken up and shows three or four layers of previous surfacing, like geological strata.

I’ve had two near-side alloy wheels trashed on the inside edge through hitting the edge of deep water-filled potholes, one of which bent the rim outward, without me being aware of it; I only found out how bad it was after taking the car in to have the tyre checked because there was a persistent slow leak. That could have caused a catastrophic blowout on a motorway… 😳

This week we have had the path outside our house resurfaced, the dropped kerbs made bigger and the verges given proper edging.
We are very pleased with the results but there was nothing wrong with it before, unlike the road which has bloody great holes in it.

The budget has given 200m to fill potholes, ocean and peeing comes to mind.

The budget has given 200m to fill potholes, ocean and peeing comes to mind.

An additional £200m, on top of the existing £500m.

Where I work has £1.35m of that fund allocated to us so our thinking is that is there's a 40% increase to the fund overall, it might go up to £1.89m automatically.

Still not a lot though. It's the equivalent of turning up to a disaster zone with a first aid kit and a roll of bandage rather than an entire field hospital.

I reckon there's plenty money, it's just the people entrusted to spend that money are both hamstrung and incompetent from top to bottom.
Hamstrung because a simple fix to the road needs full traffic control and a couple of guys sitting in a pickup all day. Changing that system back to the better way it wad in the 80's would be nice.
Water being allowed to sit on the road surface is behind the vast majority of the damage I see on the roads.
Simple preventative maintenance would fix most of it, but incompetence...

We are very pleased with the results but there was nothing wrong with it before, unlike the road which has bloody great holes in it.

Pavements will probably be local council, road will be highways - joined up thinking at it's best again. "Different budgets guvnor, gotta spend it".

Pavements will probably be local council, road will be highways – joined up thinking at it’s best again. “Different budgets guvnor, gotta spend it”.

That's a popular myth (about the budget thing) but it's not entirely true. It's relatively easy to move stuff around or to have projects across financial years so you can announce a project in February using funding from that year but it can start in April - you just roll the funding forward since it was effectively in the previous year's budget.

The piecemeal nature of the funding, where you constantly have to apply for grants, wait to be told how much you'll get (and then have that figure chopped and changed a couple of times because the Government like to remind the little councils who is in charge) before finally being awarded the money is what makes it difficult to decide on projects and timelines.

Roads are problematic though, it's common enough to find a road under the jurisdiction of 2 councils. Near mine there was a landslip issue right on the council boundary but to fix it, they have to have access to a field at the side. No-one could find out who owned the field. Absentee landlord with a string of tenant and sub-tenant "owners" and it took 3 years to resolve the land ownership issue and get access to the site, each council bickering over who was leading and then Council A had no money but when they did, Council B had spent their allocation, then they both had money but still no access to the land at the side.

Someone came along and put some balloons and banners up on the roadwork's 3rd birthday.
Took 2 weeks to fix it once everything was actually in place.