£16 Billion Pothole

[Bper]

It's been estimated that to repair the backlog of potholes nationwide it will cost £16 billion. From a decision made in October 2023, the Government announced it would provide £8.3 billion of extra funding over 11 years to fix potholes in England.

This was part of the Network North strategy to use money saved by scrapping the planned extension of HS2 north of Birmingham. It was also reported that Chesterfield in Derbyshire is the worst place in the country for potholes.

Should the roads be given priority over other infrastructure programmes?

 

[Roy124]

Remember the days when Paddy would knock on your door, load of asphalt spare, want your drive doing?

Today our repair teams are sent out with only enough to repair the holes on their job sheet today.

This gives rise to one pothole being repair and the next not done till the new job sheet.

Or a pothole of a precise dimension being repaired only for the next bit breaking up.

Our Highways seem fixated on FixMyStreet reports from the public when its own employees and councillors cover the entire district on a weekly basis.   

 

[Haliotis]

While discussing potholes on GB News, someone pointed out that, whilst the councils were slow to put them right, having to take our cars to garages for steering/suspension damage, each repair did earn the government 20% VAT.

[Bper]

The RAC Pothole Index, which has tracked the condition of Britain’s roads since 2006, now stands at 1.70, up from 1.62 at the end of 2022. While this is nowhere near the all-time high of 3.5 recorded in Q1 2010, at 1.7 the index suggests drivers are more than one-and-a-half times as likely to experience pothole damage as they were 15 years ago.

Britain’s road maintenance system have once again been embarrassingly exposed as nearly 30,000 RAC members endured pothole problems and potentially very costly repairs in 2023. Potholes are so much more than an irritation they are a very serious danger to all road users which we fear will only get worse as the weather gets colder during colder months.

[Parts-King]

This was on the local BBC news last night, they showed the company Colas repairing roads in Chester and a very good job they were doing. However, when they recently filled some potholes in my village, they did a disgusting job, somebody surely must come and check what they are doing, it looked like they threw a shovel full of Tarmac in the hole and whacked it down the the back of said shovel. Absolutely shocking job and will need doing again within weeks

[Cyker]

It is extremely variable isn't it - The team that does the M1 stretch up to the M25 are pot-hole filling gods and deserve worship - All the patches they do are millimetricly flat, neat, edged properly and last for ages.

Most other repairs on the other hand often look like someone didn't even bother to prepare the hole and just poured tar into it and called it a day, and the next bus or HGV or probably EV SUV that drives over it on a warm day just pushes all the tar out.

The ones near me, they used good quality tarmac, but apparently didn't have anything to flatten it with as we effectively now have 6 new full-width speed humps down our sliproad after a team came to fill in the fullwidth cracks that had grown. Thankfully, because it is one of the access roads for a nearby school, the sheer number of hausfrauenpanzers that go over them every day are slowly flattening them to road level and I reckon in a couple of months it should be pretty flat, at least where the wheel tracks are. Bicycles who insist of using the road instead of the cycle lane and anyone with a 3-wheeler will not have a fun time as it all gets pushed to the sides and middle though...