Seeing this item on the BBC news website reminded me of a few years ago when I was pulled over almost outside my house for “Driving erratically”. This was just after 2pm, on my way back from a swim.
I replied to the Policeman “I was avoiding the potholes, the same as you were.” He laughed and admitted they were dreadful.
Curiously (coincidence?) our road was resurfaced about six months later. Alas, it is now deteriorating badly again with random lumpy patches, and will be dire after next winter. It might even be killed off during next few years by the HS2 traffic, with a couple of hundred fully laden maximum weight earth moving trucks carrying spoil every day. With any luck the (rebuilt just before the resurfacing) new bridge over our stream will collapse under one.
I’m beginning to wonder if all this emphasis on “filling potholes” is wrong. A road with potholes is worn out, we don’t need to fill the holes we need to replace the road. Pothole filling is short term and surely in the long run quite probably not cost effective. A section of road near me has now had its third pothole filled and when you look at it you can see where the next one and the next one are going to appear in the next few months!
A recent trip across Switzerland saw us swerving around precisely zero potholes. But we did stop at quite a few sets of traffic lights where they were replacing whole sections of road, and in many places not just the top wearing course, they had excavated some depth and were doing the whole thing. So whether they replace at the very first sign of a problem or whether they simply have all roads on some sort of rolling replacement schedule who knows, but driving there is like a breath of fresh air, you really don’t need to spend your whole time looking at the road surface.
I’ve heard it said, but unable to verify, that Essex C.C. only do a minimum of repairs because they find it cheaper to settle claims than to carry out extensive road repairs
In North Notts and South Yorkshire there are no longer any potholes. There are lumps. These are the remains of the original road surface before the potholes all joined up and became one.
There are a couple of road sections very close to me that are rougher than some unsurfaced roads I ride my trail bike over in the Peak District. It’s disgraceful.
Every highway engineer I know would love to have the budget to resurface as many roads as they can. But , as you may have heard from the caring Tory party ‘we’re all in this together’ and budgets have been slashed , year on year , for a decade…
Last December / January I drove about 3500 kms in Australia, much of which on “outback” roads mainly used by HGVs and farm vehicles.
When I returned home, I encountered more potholes driving from Gloucestershire to Oxford than I did in that entire trip.
As previous posters on the thread have indicated, filling potholes is just a temporary fix to a permanent problem - our roads are built and maintained to a price rather than safety and longevity
There are just too many factors involved. Too much traffic on too many roads that were never built to handle it. Too much to be done and too little time can be allowed for the necessary roadworks/closures to do it before the entire road network becomes gridlocked. Plus the fact that the funds available a far too small to pay for all the work that needs to be done.
In my youth (over half a century ago) local councils had their own permanent teams of road menders who were able to patch up roads before they deteriorated too far. It seems they were largely disbanded eons ago and contracts are now only awarded to outside agencies as and when claims for car damage become too much of a burden.
It now seems many of our roads, like the ship, have been ruined for a ha’porth of tar.
Four years ago I did a touring event in northern Spain. The roads were amazingly well kept, even up in the Cantabrian Mountains, well away from towns or villages. High grip surfacing, as sometimes applied in UK piecemeal to accident spots such as very sharp corners or prior to junctions, was laid for miles on some roads.
We did comment at the time that maybe all the money spent on roads was why their economy was on the brink of collapse - but we certainly were impressed!
Roads in Italy are worse than ours though, in fact a lot of them a terrible, and you see almost no roadworks at all, so they are only going to get worse. That is apart from the toll motorways which are much better than ours.
They resurfaced one of our roads in the summer and after being misdirected by the Avery numpties with the red and green lollipops, it cost me 4 new tyres. That was less than 24 hours of collecting my first MX-5.
But that bitter episode apart, the council gangs did seem to keep on top of it better than all this outsourcing. And whatever happened to using old tyres as a hard wearing substrate ? Another James Burke letdown (RIP).