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?

You need to be a chameleon right now, looking as far ahead as possible while looking just in front of your bonnet in case you rip a wheel off. I felt bad for ds taking his test this week. There was a moon creator in front of the test centre.

Thank god for my old banger with no low profile tyres or Alloys. The good thing is the humour on the community FB groups.

I remember that in the early 90s, whenever a neighbourhood road was resurfaced it would be perfectly smooth, so that we kids would go there specially to roller-blade on it. I haven't seen a road resurfaced to that standard for a very long time (although I assume motorways still are).

Now we get pothole repair (eventually) and the occasional surface dressing. Surface dressing is horrible. They basically just chuck tar and gravel down and expect the vehicles to flatten it for them. Most of the original bumps still remain on the road, and the now recessed drain covers are a hazard for cyclists.

Proper fixes take 7 times as long as time temporary fixes. My local council received 46,000 reports of potholes last year. They say they need £600 million to fix all the potholes that have been reported. Central government gives them £30 million and they allocated funds to match that. So they have £60 million. That's just 10% of what they need.

It's chicken and egg, though. A lot of speed bumps are so ridiculously high that they loudly scrape our small car's exhaust, however slowly you drive over them. Then, of course, you add in all of the potholes as well; whatever the government and councils might say, what they actually do screams out unequivocally that they are desperately urging you to buy a 4x4.

In the town where I lived as a child, there were two blokes from the council who had a pickup truck. In it was a big pile of tarmac, some shovels, pickaxes, a few paving slabs and a bubbling cauldron of tar. Their sole job was to drive round and round the town, looking for potholes in the road or a broken slab on the pavement. They'd stop their van, get out and fix the problem in two minutes. They also had vats of white and yellow paint to patch road markings. Job done.

The small problems were fixed so they never grew into big ones. All it cost the council was two blokes' wages, a truck and some basic building supplies.

It's getting desperate when councils are following the 'Sam Vimes Boots Principle' as their official model. Surely any idiot knows that, if something costs 5 times the price but lasts 10 years - whereas the cheapo repair lasts for a week or two and then has to be done all over again - it's a worthwhile investment?

It's ironic that councils have started to use all kinds of business-like language and actually see themselves as businesses... yet they have not the faintest idea of what sound long-term investment looks like.

If you ran a takeaway and were neglectful with your hygiene standards, resulting in lots of customers getting food poison, the council would be immediately on your back and forcing you to make urgent proper improvements or otherwise order your business to close; yet when it comes to a vital part of their business that they are paid to be responsible for - i.e. repairing and preventing potholes - they suffer no consequences whatsoever, not even having to compensate motorists, cyclists and pedestrians for repairs, let alone for the many personal injuries and other negative financial consequences.

I was a small child in the 70s , and seem to recall our road getting resurfaced with tarmac every summer. Not just holes, the entire road was covered by this big truck that spread it. I can still remember sitting on the kerb playing with a bit of the tar like play dough. I can still smell it now.

It’s disgusting. My mum recently took my dad for cancer treatment at mt V, hit a pothole it completely destroyed her tyre and alloy!

I honestly think the biggest problem is that it’s often no longer the council repairing the pot holes, its contractors. Contractors obviously need the work so it’s very much in their interests if they only do a “good enough” repair rather than fix the issue properly. They are out to make a profit off the council. It’s no surprise that the potholes started getting worse when use of contractors became the norm.
There are some near me that are horrific. They were “fixed” the second week of January but they are at least as bad now as they were before the repair again now. The contractor didn’t seal the edges of the repaired hole so water was immediately able to get in.
I actually spent an hour driving slowly home on one of my worst routes stopping and taking pictures of every pothole and reported every single one of them. Some of the edges of the roads here are also in shocking conditions because they have had constant water running down the roads all winter because of the relentless wet weather. Equally the council no longer adequately maintain the ditches and drains so the water has nowhere to run but down the road.
Cars being heavier is somewhat irrelevant as our road network should be built and maintained adequately to cope with the weight of the vehicles. But the biggest issue by far is the damage done by lack of good drainage and water run off, not vehicle weight.

I don't think it makes a difference who runs the council or what party your MP is, they all promised miracles with fixing potholes when campaigning for election as they knew that was people wanted to hear. The potholes are equally bad from county to county.

It's a council strategy to save money.

Instead of putting every speed limit down to 20mph they leave the potholes which work as speed bumps and have the same effect.

They save money on the consultation, cost of new street signs and mending the potholes. Win all round.

Whereas now it takes several teams

1. To shift through the online reporting
2. To go and look at pothole and decide if it's bad enough for repair
3. To stick a ring of paint round said pothole to indicate it needs repairing
4. To actually mend the repair.

Our large town council isn't responsible for potholes. That's the county councils job. The county council website reporting is a web form from the stone age. I report but it's a pain in the backside

It should be more local when our local authorities merge in a couple of years. I wonder if it'll get better as the problems will be under the nose of people who can fix them.

There was a huge one on the fairly main road at the bottom of our road which I had to manoeuvre round when pulling out, it was patched fairly quickly but not very well, it looked like some tarmac has just been shoved in it, don't think it will last long.

It's because they don't repair them properly, they just fill in a pot hole, not dig them out and fix them properly. They fixed one at the end of my road in September, by November it was a massive hole again!

Where I live they are horrendous! It's really dangerous as you have to swerve to avoid them if you can, or end up ruining your tyres by driving into them.

Yeah cheap fixes and heavy cars.. we rejoiced when a big one finally got filled in after years on a busy A road, everyone had to drive around it which was dangerous.. after a few weeks it was open again.

They recently assessed each county for potholes, using a traffic light system to show how good or bad each one was. Our county was classified as green, so I can't begin to imagine how dreadful they need to be before you get classified as red.

Maybe it's another big gaslighting attempt - like all the schools who insist that they would crack down hard on bullying... except, how serendipitous, as they are all lucky enough not to actually have any bullying problems whatsoever!

Because it’s rained non-stop. Where we live it’s rained every day of 2026 so far. My field has like 10cm of standing water in parts. My house is nearly 300 years old and a piece of the wall got waterlogged the other day and started to collapse. It’s been there for nearly 3 centuries and been fine, but these past couple months of rain have done it in. It’s just rained a lot. It happens every year and then the potholes are repaired in spring, but this is an unusually bad year. Ask anyone who keeps livestock how we’re doing. 😳

That said, potholes aren’t easy to fix. As much as people want to complain. We have a private drive that is more like a road to our house, used only by us and neighbours (second home so not often) and some couriers. Dh and I wfh so only really use it daily to do the school run, so maybe sees 5 cars a day. You should see the potholes. Doesn’t matter if we patch them. Or re-grade it. More rain and a bit of use and they’re back. 🤷🏻‍♀️ It’s just a never ending battle. Ours is still better than the other neighbours on the other side, I can barely get to their house in a 4x4 and the water is half way up wellies for good bits of their drive. They do nothing to maintain it, so goes to show you what a little maintenance does even when it isn’t perfect looking, it’s passable.

something like 75/80 percent of Wiltshire’s budget goes on adult care and children with SEN.
They have no money for road repair.

I've thought this on many occasions too.

Call me a conspiracist, but I also wonder whether it's all deliberate that 'repaired' potholes are done so shockingly badly that they only last a week or two.

The councils can't be seen to be totally ignoring reported potholes; but once everybody knows that they only do a botched temporary patch-up job anyway, we will become resigned to the fact that they can't/won't be properly dealt with and stop bothering to report them in the first place - so their caseload will decrease dramatically and their figures will look great. Weaponised incompetence, basically.

Yet when the council tax demands keep going up and up (our council have just announced a 9% increase), we aren't allowed to just exclaim that, sadly, we have no more money left and just not pay it...

The fix the roads really cheaply so it doesn’t last. We have a pot hole near me that opens up every single year. If they did a good job of it in the first place, they’d probably save money overall!!!!

The roads around here are so bad that my husband has vowed to replace his saloon car with a 4x4 when the time comes.

Yes it’s dreadful around there

That’ll be it then.