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It would take local authorities 13 years to clear the backlog in repairs due to England’s roads and cost an average of £47m per authority to repair them fully in one hit, according to a new report published today.

The Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance survey (ALARM) covers the roads in England and Wales maintained by local authority highways departments.

Compiled by the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) it describes the state of Britain’s roads as a “crisis,” and said the bac...Read the full article

Our local authority's strategy for rural road repairs is pathetic. I regularly come across two blokes in a yellow flatbed , patting some cold fill into pot holes, or the yawning gap between road and verge, with the back of a shovel. Within days, the cold fill is gone, and there are several larger pot holes where previously there was one. The edge of most roads is now totally unusable except by tractors. Meanwhile, the road surface continues to crack and break up. Rather than pay some overpriced contractor to continually bodge, surely our money would be better spent doing some planned preventative maintenance, just as I have my car regularly serviced, rather than waiting for it to go bang. Bring back tar and chippings! Or at least use what meagre budget you have to resurface one road properly occasionally.

The roads are getting worse, you really have to look out for potholes,

In the car, I've bent a wheel and lost a couple of tyres over the last year or so. Makes tyre insurance worth it!

On a push bike it's worse! There are certain roads that I won't ride my road bike down (Skinny wheels, dropped bars etc) because you are guaranteed a puncture, or worse and end up having to use my Mountain Bike, or change the route

My other half has been known to 'co-drive' looking out for potholes!

I've never known the roads to be as bad as thisin ovwer 25 years of driving

It's a disgrace, what do they spend the road tax and fines on?

Richard H:

It's a disgrace, what do they spend the road tax and fines on?

 

Pay-per-view porn.

Pay per view Porn... aaaah thats a laugh... thats made my day!  But seriously people, come to Ireland and take a drive through County Meath.  There are so many new roads and motorways being built or upgraded in Ireland and yet the majority of the existing ones are utterly disgraceful.  They simply WRECK your car.  Preferrably take a drive in a rental, especially if you have any respect for your own car.  The tracking on my car is always off, no matter how many times I pay to have it done.  No sooner have I left the garage after having it reset and I've hit another pothole or 4 inch change in road surface level (where part of the road has been resurfaced) and my car is veering left into the ditch again.  I've driven in the UK and I happen to think that you guys don't know how lucky you are. Properly surfaced roads, properly wide motorways, intelligently planned junctions, amber lights 'get ready' lights before the traffic lights turn green, overhead signage on motorways, illuminated road signs, rural roads with proper markings, road signs that point in the right direction, roads signs that can be read without having to peer through the thicket, any roadsigns at all!  On the road I use daily, it has taken over 6 months to build a roundabout.  The UK is lightyears ahead of us in terms of infrastructure but alas despite the amount of money being extorted from your drivers through the boom years you will probably over the next 5 years notice the roads becoming worse and worse as the government find other ways to spend it.  We're expecting much the same here.  But perhaps you should console yourselves with the knowledge that the Irish Government's mismanagement of the country will ensure that even if your roads should crumble into dust, they will still remain superior to ours.

Come on fellas, it's not just under-maintenance by councils that's caused the roads to be as they are.

As much as many wish to deny or ignore it the last winter particularly was a cold one. Most parts of the country saw many nights of frost followed by sleet and snow. As a cyclist on 23mm section tyres one could witness after each major frost event the road literally cracking up and new potholes opening up from the mechanical action of tyres going over frost-produced cracks, not to mention major surface ruptures caused by burst water pipes under the road surface or service valves. Add to this the increasing prevelance of wider tyres and higher torque vehicles - turbodiesels up to around 40% of vehicle parc - and you have a recipe for vast disintegration of Britain's roads.

Maintenance, what there has been, has also been hindered by the cold, wet summers of the last two years. Even with modern machinery there is no real substitute for warm, fine weather when undertaking major new asphalt laying or even patching sealed by bitumen.

There are other factors too. From a cyclists point of view one watches that it is common for a line of traffic to follow each other moronically; too close and literally in each other's wheeltracks(overtaking, which can disperse these ridiculous convoys, is almost dead due to fear of camera traps and road-rage attacks from the 'how dare you overtake me' brigade). This alone ensures that the road surface wears unevenly and any nascent potholes are soon excavated out by blindly following, non-circumventing, zombie drivers. Another factor is the speeding up and slowing down caused by over-zealous attention to speed limit enforcement and increasingly powerful, torquey vehicles. Accelerating hard and braking hard to maintain a decent average speed in increasingly common 30mph and 20mph limits again wears the road surface faster than would otherwise be the case with a more even flow.

kerrecoe:

Pay-per-view porn.

It's not the porn that costs so much, just the Kleenex.

I've never really got to the bottom of local politics and how it fits into road repair. You think it would be a straight forwrad affair, but I tend to find everyone is blaming each other. As is a politician of any levels wont, but the roads remain pot holed and my Lexus LS 460 is now requiring a full third set of shocks after 60,000 miles and my passengers are getting their Gin and Tonics down their blue Worsted suits. Not to mention the staining on the carpet, leather trim and the walnut interior gets sticky.

At least, I hope it's Gin and Tonic, there is a DVD in the back...

"Each authority in England and Wales has an average of 29,257 trenches dug in its roads over the course of a year, with a total of around two million dug in total – double the number of potholes repaired in 2008."

I assume this is also including the trenches dug by the various services.

I drive down through Kent and East Sussex on a regular basis and it never ceased to amaze me how many times the roads are dug up for "services" maintenance.

Why do they not create a services trench which runs along side the road, covered with easily removable slabs.  No this would not sort all of the problems, but it would reduce the amount of "patching" that would need to be done.

Teg,

Wouldn't mind as much if they did a good job. Been up the 128 towards Brentwood recently where they spent 4 weeks fixing the road after the freeze? Its a joke to say the least, the bump they have created on ly only one side is about 2 inches high and really unsettles the car.... There needs to be more quality control!

How about proportinal spending?

road fund license plus all taxes on fuel to only be spent on road repairs and improvements. If there is a surplus then the taxes are reduced, and the robbers in government can find their shortfalls from the areas that generate the costs in the first place.

TegTypeR:

Why do they not create a services trench which runs along side the road, covered with easily removable slabs.

Seems like a good idea until you remember the mindless idiots who would pull up the covers and damage whatever they could find underneath just for the fun of it or to remove the pipes and cables etc to sell as scrap or use elsewhere.

horseandcart:

Come on fellas, it's not just under-maintenance by councils that's caused the roads to be as they are.

Yes, I can see how it being cold in winter caught out the councils, just as the 'wrong type of snow' caught out the rail operators some years back ;) However, I maintain that if the roads had been properly protected with bitumen and gravel prior to the winter, then the damage caused by water seeping into the broken surface and freezing would not have been so severe. Not sure about turbo-diesels ripping up the asphalt either! The tyres are surely the weakest link in the battle.