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?

The Government have frozen the threshold everywhere else for income, student loans. They just took a 30 billion surplus off all of us! They can definitely afford to fill the potholes.

No they didn't, vast majority have no seen tax increases, income tax TH were already frozen, RR extended that....

To fix the UKs roads would cost around 15 billion, PO scandal around 12 billion, NI cut is £11 billion per year to find, then there is defence spend, SENDs provision, demands for more FREE child care.

So the £30 billion isn't going far.

Yet again, people want more public spending but don't want to pay for it.

Yep. They seem pretty happy they’ve taken the money. While hitting jobs too.

Oh yes, I’d forgotten about her! I’m not sure when it was broadcast as I watched it on catch up when I was bored. But I did find it very interesting.

JCB have developed a machine that can fill a pothole in 8 minutes. They are selling a lot of these abroad but I suppose they are too expensive for councils in UK to buy.
I’d have thought it would be a good investment.

The Beetles sang about 4,000 potholes in Lancashire, taken from a daily Mail article in 1967 about national decline, in their song “Day in the Life”. Some things never change!

if Labour want any chance of winning another election, I would be making filling potholes more of a priority. It is what people see day to day. As a family, we have definitely been paying more tax and seen a decline in our living standards. Not fixing the potholes would be incredibly stupid of them not to do, it affects everyone, like the NHS.

Apart from lack of funding, the weather is playing havoc.

I think that's in the Monster Raving Loonie Party's manifesto

They're scrapping the MOT to show that cars are roadworthy and introducing the ROT to show that roads are car worthy.

Along with putting a plastic duck by each pothole.

1967 and the Beetles song, it’s a symbol of a huge national crisis.
That’s the whole point, it’s a national embarrassment symptomatic of huge problems. We aren’t in 1967 - things are much better than in 1967?
Hence why they need to sort it out urgently. We can’t control the weather. We can control our streets and people have paid their fuel duty, VAT and road tax.

That and litter everywhere.

The cost of the public relentlessly goes up though. We don’t have a tax revenue problem, we have a spending problem.

Of course it goes up, we had very high inflation for 3 years, our population has shot up in the last 5 years.
So that means huge increases in public spending on wages, materials, medicines, road mtce materials... welfare for an aging population, tax credits because wages are often too low to live on.... and yes disability benefits too.

Number of cars on UK roads is 12m higher than it was 26 years ago, yet has our road network kept up?

As for litter, well, i don't think we can blame that on Labour surely? thats on us, no one else but course we expect Councils to tidy up after us don't we.

The car tax has risen steeply though

We’ve also got ageing road infrastructure & that needs reporting on more. The Institute of Structural Engineers has a warning that older car parks can’t cope with the weight of larger SUVs as they were designed for 1960s & 1970s cars. That’s been reported on but not in much depth. I’ve not heard my council addressing this even though we have car parks that age.

they've already ready given more funding to fix potholes. I often question what my conservative led council are actually spending it on mind.

My local roads are in the shadow of HS2 😡, so we get all the heavy machinery on semi rural roads. Bloody nightmare

They spent thousands taking down flags recently and the comment was made it was important to do a it may distract drivers!! No a flag wouldn’t distract me. I would definitely be distracted if my little car hit a massive hole though.

So yes, the money is there.

Don't know, but there'll be extra logistics/health and safety of teams working in the he dark. For all I know they might work in the dark but I'm betting it will be more expensive.

As a cyclist pootling around my Northants town, I’m finding it’s a huge problem. I had to avoid a nasty one yesterday which put me too close to a lorry travelling behind me. I agree with others, all the reasons listed have caused it.

i saw a post on IG of a man taken out by a pothole whilst riding a rented scooter. He suffered facial injuries and was unconscious for a time.

Locally, we have a recurring area where pot holes open up each year. As soon as we have a freeze and then rain they are open again. It’s an area of road on the bottom of a hill so water builds up in that area. Lots more too but this area is yearly.

I find threads like this deeply challenging OP, having previously worked in local authorities.

Speaking more generally than you, it just screams to me of wilful ignorance. ‘Why can’t something be done?!’

Since 2008, local authority budgets have been cut to the core, at the same time as they have faced rising demand for both adult and children’s social care. There is less money in the pot, and it needs to go further. Those with long memories will remember that it actually started before the coalition, but the 2010 financial settlement for councils was the most damaging thing that has ever been done to this country. It stripped council budgets so far back that anything important but not urgent had to be deprioritised, and it’s my view that this is what led to the political instability and feelings of disenfranchisement.

It was also deeply stupid, because the cost didn’t just go away, it was then felt somewhere else. Poverty and the lack of early help translated into more expensive crisis costs.

So yes, potholes are annoying and yes I wish someone would do something about them but what world do people live in that they need this explained to them?

@MayWellandbut we pay a separate tax for our cars…..

Yes. But it doesn’t go to local authorities. It goes to central government. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01482/

Torque from EVs is ridiculous and rips the surface up.

Power steering will dig a hole if you turn your steering when stopped.

And roads were never constructed to bear the axle weights.

Add to that freeze/thaw and regular deluges.