“Couple this with the effects of the extreme weather we are increasingly facing, and the result is that the rate at which local roads are suffering is accelerating towards breaking point.”
I keep hearing this, but I’ve been to Sweden, where the weather is objectively even more extreme, yet they don’t have anywhere near the amount of broken roads that we have.
Yeah no shit – I’m surprised I’ve not had a bastard tyre blowout and ended up in a ditch with some of the beasts I’ve driven over down rural roads near me.
Meanwhile £300m is spent on a motorway junction scheme that is only needed because of bad driving such as middle lane hoggers. About the same or more is planned to build a tunnel under Stonehenge to save time for summer weekends so people can get to a holiday a bit quicker.
It would help if councils didn’t go for the lowest quote and required the contractors to provide some kind of guarantee for their work. As it stands they just seem to fill the hole with tarmac, stamp it down and head off to the next job.
A recent example near me where there was a small pothole on a roundabout. They fixed it twice but did it so poorly that it opened up in a couple of days both times. It was then left for over a year and as it was a roundabout used by a lot of lorries it became much worse. It ended up so bad that the entire upper surface of the road disappeared on one side of the roundabout. It was so big that the only way to get a car through it was to drive into it with all four wheels being in there at the same time and drive out of the other side. It was about 20 feet long and 10 wide.
They ended up closing the road for the weekend and resurfacing the entire roundabout. It caused chaos because it was on one of the main routes through town.
It must have cost a fortune. If they had just fixed the original pot hole properly in the first place they could have spent a lot less money and avoided the disruption it caused.
I live in the Netherlands and the weather is pretty much the same as Northern England.
Roads do not look like this!!
Do you think this has anything to do with 14 years of Tory rule?
It’s ok, we’ve got the money to repair them now that HS2 has been cancelled.
The council here signed a *fifteen year* contract for road maintenance, which has led to the company holding the unchallenged monopoly repairing the potholes using a mix akin to custard cream debris. The same ones are getting done 2/3 times a year.
Average UK car weight had increased to 1.457 tonnes by 2020. 15% higher than it was in 2001. It will be higher now in 2024. Damage done to road surface is not logarithmic. The change in damage to road surface is proportional to the difference in axle weight to the [fourth power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law). A 2t SUV does 16 times more damage than a 1t car.
A sensible solution to the spiralling size of cars in the UK would be to introduce a swingeing tax on larger, heavier vehicles to reduce their number and to use the revenue to pay for necessary road repairs. (Rather than, for example, cancelling infrastructure investment like HS2 to finance road maintenance.)
That’s not just because of potholes or park-ability. It’s because every 100 kg increase in vehicle weight leads to a 2.4 per cent increase in [pedestrian fatalities](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022437522000810). “Driving a larger vehicle offloads fatality risk from the occupants to other road users,” – Justin Tyndall of the University of Hawaii.
I’m seeing multiple pop up every day across my usual routes, and sometimes they get bigger and bigger within the space of a few hours whilst I’m at work. For every one that eventually does get filled in, five soon take its place like there’s some kind of subterranean hydra at work.
​
The number of times I find myself thinking “shit me, that would’ve broken my car if I hadn’t noticed it for a couple more seconds” is too damn high!
I cycle to and from work, including uni and these potholes became almost deadly in the rain!
Know what doesn’t help is a substantial chunk of revenue generated from road users (fuel duty, ved etc) does not even go back into maintenance of that infrastructure in the first place, it ends up back in the general government expenditure pot and is spent elsewhere
And even then, many times over more is spent on the motorways than local infrastructure (roads)
Unlike many cases where we end up talking about theoretical money trees those funds do in fact exist in this instance
A big problem is how easily councils can shirk responsibility for damage caused by pot holes. Typically they’ll just say they inspected the road a few months ago and it was fine, therefore they did their bit, so aren’t paying out.
Make councils liable for all pot hole damage and see how quickly they get off their arses and fix them.
We have a shortage of fruit pickers in the summer and a shortage of road repair crews in the winter. I feel like the government could join those problems together along with providing housing and transport and create an industrial army to fix both problems while providing good wages and conditions.
This is what happens when road tax is not invested into roads. Couple that with quick fix repairs rather than proper resurfacing.
Went to Spain recently and my 10yo marvelled at how good the roads were, asking me why they don’t have any potholes.
But Rishi said he would fix this problem with the money they “saved” from scrapping HS2. The Tories wouldn’t lie, would they?
There’s a Scottish company that made a new type of road surface that’s about 30% recycled plastic. Almost 10 years ago they made a test spot about a mile long on one of the busiest roads in the area, it’s never had a pothole.
The council haven’t bothered to resurface any roads with their stuff since, even though it’s amazing. Our region now officially has the worst roads in the country.
Pot holes are not being repaired they are being very badly patched over.
The country’s at breaking point. The roads are just a symptom.
Anyone who blames councils is putting it in the ERONG place. Central government funding to local councils (responsible for highways) has been cut by 50% just one source https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/29/how-a-decade-of-austerity-has-squeezed-council-budgets-in-england Question; where has all that money gone? Question; do you think multinationals should be paying UK tax? Question; do you feel the country and your area are better off than they were in 2010? Question; what are we going to do about it?
Of course we could all use all the tax cuts to pay for private roads… Oh yeah food and utilities…🙄🤔
Well the elections are round the corner so it will be time for another picture of Sunak pointing at a pot hole
Eight year high, in an election year? Hmmmm some might think there is a reason this increase in funding for road repair, this year of all years.
Good luck trying to charge drivers any more money to get them fixed, we’ll probably just have to close some schools or something for the cash.
Why not just get anyone doing over 1 year of prison to fill potholes in their local area. At least get some value for our tax money keeping them in a box for years and years. Pay back to society and give them a purpose. GPS them up and anyone who runs or escapes get +20 years added.
Legalise Cocaine and Weed and tax it at 75%. Use the money to finish HS2. With how my local pub goes through the stuff we’d have the cash in about 6 days to fund the lot.
It’s out of control where I live, there are potholes literally everywhere, some of them are 4 inches deep or worse. Where’d the money go?
I blame the increase in SUV-s and heavy EV-s at least in part. Just from memory, I’d say every 4th car is a *normal* sized car where I am, it’s simply unreal how many oversized environment killing large cars there are.
Roads are looking extra nuts in North manchester at the moment. I’ve seen some huge holes in the road and seen multiple people getting their cars ruined by them.
Saw a guy blow out a tire on one last week, a womans whole front axle pretty much snapped from one and a some poor bloke was half way through changing a tire last night outside the gym because of a pot hole.
At this rate everyone’s going to have to be driving pickups and land-rovers just to take the kids to school (despite the majority already doing this for no reason other than “look at my huge mega car on lease)
The obvious answer is that the UK needs to do what Spain did 20 years ago and go on a massive road and infrastructure building spree.
For some reason however, this extremely straightforward aspect of being a first world country seems to escape the constantly moronic UK.
27 comments
“Couple this with the effects of the extreme weather we are increasingly facing, and the result is that the rate at which local roads are suffering is accelerating towards breaking point.”
I keep hearing this, but I’ve been to Sweden, where the weather is objectively even more extreme, yet they don’t have anywhere near the amount of broken roads that we have.
Yeah no shit – I’m surprised I’ve not had a bastard tyre blowout and ended up in a ditch with some of the beasts I’ve driven over down rural roads near me.
Meanwhile £300m is spent on a motorway junction scheme that is only needed because of bad driving such as middle lane hoggers. About the same or more is planned to build a tunnel under Stonehenge to save time for summer weekends so people can get to a holiday a bit quicker.
It would help if councils didn’t go for the lowest quote and required the contractors to provide some kind of guarantee for their work. As it stands they just seem to fill the hole with tarmac, stamp it down and head off to the next job.
A recent example near me where there was a small pothole on a roundabout. They fixed it twice but did it so poorly that it opened up in a couple of days both times. It was then left for over a year and as it was a roundabout used by a lot of lorries it became much worse. It ended up so bad that the entire upper surface of the road disappeared on one side of the roundabout. It was so big that the only way to get a car through it was to drive into it with all four wheels being in there at the same time and drive out of the other side. It was about 20 feet long and 10 wide.
They ended up closing the road for the weekend and resurfacing the entire roundabout. It caused chaos because it was on one of the main routes through town.
It must have cost a fortune. If they had just fixed the original pot hole properly in the first place they could have spent a lot less money and avoided the disruption it caused.
I live in the Netherlands and the weather is pretty much the same as Northern England.
Roads do not look like this!!
Do you think this has anything to do with 14 years of Tory rule?
It’s ok, we’ve got the money to repair them now that HS2 has been cancelled.
The council here signed a *fifteen year* contract for road maintenance, which has led to the company holding the unchallenged monopoly repairing the potholes using a mix akin to custard cream debris. The same ones are getting done 2/3 times a year.
Average UK car weight had increased to 1.457 tonnes by 2020. 15% higher than it was in 2001. It will be higher now in 2024. Damage done to road surface is not logarithmic. The change in damage to road surface is proportional to the difference in axle weight to the [fourth power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law). A 2t SUV does 16 times more damage than a 1t car.
A sensible solution to the spiralling size of cars in the UK would be to introduce a swingeing tax on larger, heavier vehicles to reduce their number and to use the revenue to pay for necessary road repairs. (Rather than, for example, cancelling infrastructure investment like HS2 to finance road maintenance.)
That’s not just because of potholes or park-ability. It’s because every 100 kg increase in vehicle weight leads to a 2.4 per cent increase in [pedestrian fatalities](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022437522000810). “Driving a larger vehicle offloads fatality risk from the occupants to other road users,” – Justin Tyndall of the University of Hawaii.
I’m seeing multiple pop up every day across my usual routes, and sometimes they get bigger and bigger within the space of a few hours whilst I’m at work. For every one that eventually does get filled in, five soon take its place like there’s some kind of subterranean hydra at work.
​
The number of times I find myself thinking “shit me, that would’ve broken my car if I hadn’t noticed it for a couple more seconds” is too damn high!
I cycle to and from work, including uni and these potholes became almost deadly in the rain!
Know what doesn’t help is a substantial chunk of revenue generated from road users (fuel duty, ved etc) does not even go back into maintenance of that infrastructure in the first place, it ends up back in the general government expenditure pot and is spent elsewhere
And even then, many times over more is spent on the motorways than local infrastructure (roads)
Unlike many cases where we end up talking about theoretical money trees those funds do in fact exist in this instance
A big problem is how easily councils can shirk responsibility for damage caused by pot holes. Typically they’ll just say they inspected the road a few months ago and it was fine, therefore they did their bit, so aren’t paying out.
Make councils liable for all pot hole damage and see how quickly they get off their arses and fix them.
We have a shortage of fruit pickers in the summer and a shortage of road repair crews in the winter. I feel like the government could join those problems together along with providing housing and transport and create an industrial army to fix both problems while providing good wages and conditions.
This is what happens when road tax is not invested into roads. Couple that with quick fix repairs rather than proper resurfacing.
Went to Spain recently and my 10yo marvelled at how good the roads were, asking me why they don’t have any potholes.
But Rishi said he would fix this problem with the money they “saved” from scrapping HS2. The Tories wouldn’t lie, would they?
There’s a Scottish company that made a new type of road surface that’s about 30% recycled plastic. Almost 10 years ago they made a test spot about a mile long on one of the busiest roads in the area, it’s never had a pothole.
The council haven’t bothered to resurface any roads with their stuff since, even though it’s amazing. Our region now officially has the worst roads in the country.
Pot holes are not being repaired they are being very badly patched over.
The country’s at breaking point. The roads are just a symptom.
Anyone who blames councils is putting it in the ERONG place. Central government funding to local councils (responsible for highways) has been cut by 50% just one source https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/29/how-a-decade-of-austerity-has-squeezed-council-budgets-in-england Question; where has all that money gone? Question; do you think multinationals should be paying UK tax? Question; do you feel the country and your area are better off than they were in 2010? Question; what are we going to do about it?
Of course we could all use all the tax cuts to pay for private roads… Oh yeah food and utilities…🙄🤔
Well the elections are round the corner so it will be time for another picture of Sunak pointing at a pot hole
Eight year high, in an election year? Hmmmm some might think there is a reason this increase in funding for road repair, this year of all years.
Good luck trying to charge drivers any more money to get them fixed, we’ll probably just have to close some schools or something for the cash.
Why not just get anyone doing over 1 year of prison to fill potholes in their local area. At least get some value for our tax money keeping them in a box for years and years. Pay back to society and give them a purpose. GPS them up and anyone who runs or escapes get +20 years added.
Legalise Cocaine and Weed and tax it at 75%. Use the money to finish HS2. With how my local pub goes through the stuff we’d have the cash in about 6 days to fund the lot.
It’s out of control where I live, there are potholes literally everywhere, some of them are 4 inches deep or worse. Where’d the money go?
I blame the increase in SUV-s and heavy EV-s at least in part. Just from memory, I’d say every 4th car is a *normal* sized car where I am, it’s simply unreal how many oversized environment killing large cars there are.
Roads are looking extra nuts in North manchester at the moment. I’ve seen some huge holes in the road and seen multiple people getting their cars ruined by them.
Saw a guy blow out a tire on one last week, a womans whole front axle pretty much snapped from one and a some poor bloke was half way through changing a tire last night outside the gym because of a pot hole.
At this rate everyone’s going to have to be driving pickups and land-rovers just to take the kids to school (despite the majority already doing this for no reason other than “look at my huge mega car on lease)
The obvious answer is that the UK needs to do what Spain did 20 years ago and go on a massive road and infrastructure building spree.
For some reason however, this extremely straightforward aspect of being a first world country seems to escape the constantly moronic UK.