‘In a rut’: cost of fixing pothole-plagued roads in England and Wales soars to £17bn

36 comments

1. Once again, short termism carries the day. Councils haven’t been fixing pot holes to save money and have let the problem grow into a £17bn one. They need to be held accountable and people need firing as maintaining the roads is a statutory duty they’ve failed to carry out.

2. They should come up with a new tax that pays for upkeep of roads. Road Tax would be the perfect name

3. Our county council got a bunch of money to fix potholes, they have been, but it’s majority poor quality repairs with most just being filled from a bag of cold lay stuff, this lasts days in some cases before the hole is coming back. I can understand if it is meant to be a very temporary fix before they come and do a proper patch where they cut out a section of the road, but it is usually not the case.

4. Our local council have just completely resurfaced a stretch of about 50m-70m on a busy B road near us.

   Digging it up and laying brand new tarmac; the works. It’s a beautiful short stretch of road to drive on.

   Problem is, that stretch of road was generally alright. Other stretch’s on that road and other roads nearby are significantly worse, so I’m genuinely baffled as to why they’ve done that stretch.

5. Correction. 17bn will be paid to private firms who won’t fix anything.

6. Is that the actual cost or the bloated service of 12 blokes watching 3 work?

7. How can it be 17 thousand million pounds? If there are 17 million of them, does it really cost a grand to fill one??

8. The contract everything out model for fixing everything

9. There should be road pricing on tonnage. Basically all damage is done by heavy vehicles.

   Around here the HGVs lay waste to all the b roads / back lanes as they shave a few minutes off their journey (whilst causing tens of thousands of pounds of damage to fragile lanes)

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

10. Tax vehicles by size and weight, but give a discount to buses and HGVs.

11. HGVs and buses do pretty much all the damage but don’t pay a proportional amount in road tax. Councils are spending most of their budget on social care obligations and have no funds for pot holes.

12. They should spend 25 and do the job right then and stop bodging rhem up.

13. No doubt the councils arent keeping up with the problem and spending the money needed to keep up with the maintenance, but I am convinced there is something else goung on for the roads to fall to such a state. The swarms of delivery vehicles and heavier vans on every residential road in the country must be having an impact. Its killing the highstreet, clogging the traffic and tearing up the road surfaces. Need to put a tax on home deliveries to pay for the roads.

14. Even when roads are resurfaced properly there are also issues that arise – sometimes from bad luck but I suspect also sometimes from bad planning.

    Near where I live the entire road from end to end was fully resurfaced – the original tarmac removed and replaced with new stuff that looked great.

    No more potholes. A great job was done to a frankly exceptional standard. Everyone was happy. 

    Two weeks later part of the road was dug up for utilities maintenance, the fix to the road was no where near as good. 

    Another month goes by, a different section of the road is dug up and patched.

    Rinse and repeat for a couple of years along the road and the areas around those patches are starting to show their age, whilst the rest of the road still looks new.

    I get that sometimes urgent repairs are needed, but it’s really frustrating that a road can be replaced only to be torn up again almost immediately afterwards, undoing a lot of that hard work.

15. Just draw obscene pictures around them and hey presto, the council fixes them quite quickly!

16. Like Thames water took the money and never invested

17. Will always remember the time I hit a pothole in Kirkstall that was so deep it not only burst my tyre but physically buckled my alloy wheel.

    On requesting reimbursement for the repair I was told by Leeds City Council that they “had no reports/records of a pothole in this location”, so there was no evidence that it caused the damage, and therefore they couldn’t pay out. (This was despite me attaching several photos of the pothole and the damage it caused)

    Only to find that they must have then used my car being damaged AS the report, because it got filled in later that week.

18. Maybe they can allow people to fix them in small streets 20mph themselves

19. When it comes to repair them they don’t have money,but for some reason they always have to narrow them, making bike lanes which nobody uses, blocking them, putting plastic sticks on them which disintegrate and look horrible within a month. Making humps that are borderline dangerous for cars… And putting cameras everywhere to find people…

20. I’ll pay more tax if it all goes to fixing potholes, I’m not even joking.

21. Just get on with it and do it properly. What a sad situation for a country that used to be a beacon in excellent infrastructure.

22. If only we didn’t send all those disabled kids to school, we could have afforded to fix these!

    Referencing a post on here last week, of course.

23. They need to use companies that can fix the potholes properly. If the filled potholes don’t last at least 6 months get the money back. The potholes in my area are filled, then within a day it’s a pothole again… a nice recurring job for the pothole fillers that are using cheap materials. The roads the Romans built are still going strong.

24. Councils will say that budgets are increasingly swallowed up by social care which they are obliged to provide.

    Roads and infrastructure are a basic necessity for the economy to function and grow. Investment in infrastructure should have a multiplier effect on economic growth.

    This is yet another example of the need government at all levels to prioritise spending for the productive elements of society that contribute to the economy rather than shovelling ever increasing amounts into social care. We need a grown up conversation about what the state should and shouldn’t provide and where the hard limits are.

25. I think it’s deliberate as a nudge factor for two things:
    Reducing the speed of traffic.
    Encouraging people out of personal transport.

26. The problem is we don’t fix potholes properly. We fill them with a temporary mix which just gets ripped up 12 months down the line. The scam has been going on for over a decade.

    “We will fix it for cheaper” they say, but you will pay for it every 12 months.

27. It’s Britain’s Kessler syndrome. So many potholes that the economy collapses and then there’s no money to fix them.

28. Doesn’t help with the number of fingers in the pies. The amoutbof hoops needs to be jumped through to do a few smalls holes is crazy. Like someone gets paid to go and spay a square around a hole etc.

29. When it comes to contractors in this country it’s ‘Pay peanuts, get monkeys’

30. It’s what happens when you ignore problems for so long. Too many issues in the U.K. being buried and ignored.

31. I have cycled all over the world. 

    Even most areas of the _third world_ have better, Chinese-made, roads than ours. 

    I honestly felt safer cycling in Morocco and Jordan than I do in the South East. 

32. I don’t understand why councils can’t have a few guys on salary who’s job is to maintain roads which includes properly patching potholes. Surely in the long term that will save money.

33. I just ask the same old question these days. WHERE HAS ALL THE FUCKING MONEY GONE?!?!

    We’re told we’re living in a time of unparalleled global wealth. We should be gliding around in anti-grav cars and have specialised grape-peeling robots. Instead we’re arguing over why potholes are getting worse.

    WHERE HAS ALL THE FUCKING MONEY GONE?!?

    There’s more than ever before, it’s just lining fewer and fewer pockets is my theory. Staggering wealth inequality on a systemic, cultural scale rather than individual.

34. Imagine if drivers (all vehicles) contributed towards the maintenance of the roads, imagine the millions that would be raised, they could call it hhhmmmm road tax maybe. The funds generated go solely on maintaining our roads and not in some fat cats pocket.

    Oh wait…

35. Maybe the government could make £5bn of cuts to this expenditure, see how this effects their electability

36. About two years ago, they were fixing pot holes on my street and all they where doing was chucking a little tarmac in the hole and then getting there van to run backwards and forwards over it a few times and fucked off. Whod thought that in about a 3ish weeks the holes where back to how they were before they “fixed” it

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