Can we talk about potholes please? Why are there so many?

[Irememberwhenitwasallfieldsroundhere]

Motorways seem to be reasonably well maintained but I recently drove from London to Oxford and the state of the roads is a disgrace.

Does anyone know why? Are councils or the highways agency not responsible for repairing the roads?

It's really shocking - my Waze tells me about a pothole every 10 minutes it seems.

Also, is there anything anyone can do about it? If enough people complain will councils fix the roads?

Councils should not have so many statutory roles. They should concentrate on keeping the roads nice and smooth and emptying bins.

I'd be more than happy for Social Services to be run by and funded by Central Government. The current arrangement simply doesn't work, because most County Councils/Unitary Authorities can't afford to meet the escalating cost of providing social care on top of their other responsibilities.

Labour promised to fix the UK roads in their manifesto, yet another promise broken,

If you want to descend into a discussion about failed manifesto policies, please have the common decency to start at the beginning.

Say 2010.

But cyclists could use a road for 1,000 years and not do as much damage as a days worth of 44-tonne trucks.

Which is why there's fuck all point in charging them to "use" the roads.

I gave up cycling several years ago. I used to enjoy whizzing down hills, but these days that would be suicidal behaviour due to the bumps, potholes and recessed drain covers on our local roads.

The UK has never been serious about cycling.

I’d say that potholes being fixed and roads being resurfaced here is the one thing that is noticeably different here since the change in government.

They are by no means all fixed there are still loads to do but it’s a definite improvement.

This sounds unaffordable which would explain all of the temporary fixes.

Of course it's unaffordable. However it's more unaffordable than paying for the damage done by potholes.

One answer would be to charge vehicles in proportion for the damage they do in order to fund maintenance. So for every £ needed, 90p would come from HGVs and commercial weight bearing vehicles. I would presume buses would get a pass as they are an incentive not to use the roads. Then maybe 5p for SUVs, 4p for smaller cars and a token 1p for cyclists and scooters.

Obviously that goes against decades of ensuring the taxpayer subsidises private firms in order to enrich the shareholders though. So potholes are here to stay.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-44820066

There needs to be an additional tax on heavy vehicles including electric cars.

Manufacturers should also look to build single person vehicles as so many people just want to drive to work on their own.

The thing is the future is electric. So it would be perverse to discourage their use.

However, because physics, the damage done by a vehicle is not directly proportional to it's mass. It's actually the square of the mass.

So a 2 tonne car exerts four times as much force (which we can crudely equate to damage) as a 1 tonne car.

Now put a 30-tonne lorry into that equation. Yup - it causes NINE HUNDRED times more damage than the 1 tonne car.

I take it people now realise that it's motorists subsidising road transport by an eye watering amount.

If only there were ways of putting such heavy loads onto dedicated roads - we could call them "permanent ways". If we did some R&D we might look to laying some sort of rod or metal pole along the way to put wheels on to make it easier.

We could dare to dream.

E2A - the next step in the fading memory of personal transport will be autonomous EVs. Possibly accelerated by the impending £2/litre threshold we'll see before July.

Neglect, lack of replacement, poor quality surface coating, combined with rain, means years of neglect has led to third world roads.

The thing is the future is electric. So it would be perverse to discourage their use.

They've already started doing this, though, by removing free VED for EVs and telling owners that they will have to start paying their share - even though they represented this for a long time as a tax on on-road emissions - as well as the plans for paying per mile... not to mention the ever-increasing costs of electricity, including tax.

Considering that they promoted EVs with a two-pronged benefit: helping the environment AND saving yourself a load of money, it's a strange strategy to actively seek to remove one of those twin benefits when trying to win people over.

I know the long-term plan isn't to encourage EVs per se as much as to simply ban any alternative; but it seems extremely counter-productive to be getting in there quite so early and doing what governments all do eventually - ramping up taxes and charges - whilst people still have a choice in the matter.

What I cannot understand is that potholes often seem to be repaired singly. In a road with a few potholes or emerging potholes, often it is only the one that has been reported that is repaired. To me, it would make sense to repair all the potholes on a stretch of road rather than travel from place to place to deal with individual ones, especially in the large rural county that I live in. I realise this is because the work is subcontracted and so the firm only deal with the one for which they have been hired. Perhaps time to bring this service back into the control of the council who re paying for it.

Our local Council does this. It's because they're in crisis mode, running between the worst potholes with no budget to fix the smaller ones. It's very inefficient in the long-term.

councils need to get their priorities in order. Potholes should be #1, bins second and then all the other stuff a distant third.

As someone who doesn't drive, may I respectfully suggest you think about other people and make bins #1 ?

I don't know if it's just my local council or a national thing, but they will only allow you to report potholes that are at least 40mm deep.

I'm guessing that they look at the other ones that might 'only' be 37mm deep and ignored them as a non-problem - or more likely, probably don't look at or measure them at all.

A lot of councils much prefer to opt for the nine stitches later rather than the one stitch in time, as a matter of policy.

We need a New York City Mayor

Or PatchPal

Well, since i wrote that, i ve lodged a few "Report a Pothole" to Cornwall Council and they have, to their credit, fixed them, however, its hot tar poured into a hole and not even rolled flat.

Better than hitting a 6 inch deep hole at any speed but not ideal.

I ve not noticed any improvement in roads, in fact Devon, formerly much nicer to cycle on than Cornish roads, has gone backwards.
I went up to Nottingham recently, some of their roads were shocking, no better than 12months earlier.

Unless councils do the repair properly and have the funds to resurface roads, then they will only get worse and the bill to fix properly, even more expensive.

Worth a look: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/760798

Anyone else feel like road repairs just don’t last anymore?

Near us, the same stretch has been “fixed” a few times and it’s already breaking up again. I get that some roads have underlying issues, but a lot of it just feels like short-term patching.

I came across a petition suggesting a 2-year guarantee on roadworks so repairs would actually have to last — seemed like a sensible idea.

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/760798
Please help gather support and repost on local Facebook pages