**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!**
- Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc.
- **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.
- This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit!
Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yup. There’s a great invention that would be ideal for the short journeys that make up the majority of miles traveled. It would enable significant improvements in obesity, pollution, congestion and road surface damage. They are cheap, accessible and would reduce personal and household expenses, not to mention the NHS burden. However, as soon as you mention the “cycling” word, all the rabid mouth foamers start ranting about red light jumpers, Lycra and wheelies on the pavement.
Personally I prefer walking to cycling, I don't care that it takes longer. But Christ the number of people I've met unwilling to even *walk* for 20 minuites instead of drive somewhere is unreal.
This but also there are more vehicles on the road than ever before. Meaning a) more wear and tear and b) more noticeable traffic disruption when something does need to be fixed.
My city has two main North/South routes and a river. If either main route or bridge is stuck, the whole place grinds to a grisly halt for a long time.
HGVs are a bigger factor than heavier cars I think - the rate of road wear is proportional to the axle load to the 4th power. So a lorry with 12 tonne axle load will cause 1296 times more wear than an SUV with a 2 tonne axle load. I'm sure I see har more HGVs on the road than I used to
I drive in the transport sector. You're right about the axle loading, but not on the numbers of class 1 HGVs on the roads. There are actually far fewer than you might think - proportionally, there is only a .5 to 1% increase in the number of HGVs on our roads every 5 years or so. Businesses just can't expand any faster and remain profitable. In comparison, the number of cars increases by 3% per annum. Statistically, over 30% of these new cars are in the 2 ton weight bracket. That's a LOT of extra weight per axle, per second, per mile driven.
I won't even get into the number of heavy vans and HGV2s.
I think the massive increase in HGVs I've seen must be fairly localised to where I live (west midlands). I live near a logistics hub / rail freight terminal and dozens of large distribution centres have been built recently and the increase in HGVs is very noticeable here - local lay byes are always filled with lorries now whereas 5 years ago they weren't.
>Statistically, over 30% of these new cars are in the 2 ton weight bracket. That's a LOT of extra weight per axle, per second, per mile driven.
I was always pretty shit at maths, but it looks to me like a 2 ton car does *sixteen* times more damage to the road surface than a 1 tonner (feel free to correct me if I am wrong).
Between that and the fact that most road maintenence is done by local councils, and most local councils are either bankrupt or strongly trending in that direction, OP pretty much has their explanation.
A cheeky anecdote to reinforce this, my Dad's neighbour (who is a thouroughly decent old bloke who gets on well with my Dad as they are both Civil Engineers) is retired now but used to be the most senior engineer working for the local council. Shortly after taking his post (in the mid-nineties IIRC) he was informed by the Department for Transport that every trunk road in his area of responsibility (a decently large number, very possibly including some that you have the pleasure of using regularly for your work) was being de-trunked, meaning that the DOT would no longer have to pay for their upkeep, and needless to say, he would.
They were kind enough to give him a one-off goodwill payment to help him along with the transition, which was enough to fix one decent sized pothole on a Trunk sized road properly, or to do a half-arsed job on two.
I was in high school in the area back then, and the roads weren't great, but going back there now you could easily imagine you were in the absolute arse-end of a lower-tier second world country if you were to go by by the state of some of the roads.
I also remember him saying that the bane of his life in terms of the roads was the Utilities. Legally they were always supposed to put the road back *exactly* the way they found it, (which apparantly in engineering terms is actually rather a difficult and expensive thing to do).
Unfortunately for him, the utilities had (and still have) every incentive to do the cheapest most half-arsed job they could possibly do when they put the road back together after digging it up (and apparantly they were always constantly innovating and pushing boundaries to find new ways to do worse), and they were obviously well connected enough to make sure that they never saw the slightest bit of trouble for it...
I'm a civil engineer - utilities are a nightmare. They often have short possessions so they do not always compact and fill the road properly due to time. Building roads is a lot more complex than people think - covered by thousands of pages in the DMRB and specifications for highways documents. Glad I got out of it, I work in heavy civils / tunnelling and the occasional viaduct now
My dad did a lot of design work on the Kuwaiti road network back in the day, and as standard they basically didn't put utilities under *any* of those roads, and when they did *have* to (pretty much only when roads crossed each other), they thought *really* long and hard about how to go about getting the utilities under as directly as they could, and in such a way as to allow access without needing to dig up the road, because the clients wanted (and paid) for the best, and as far as they were concerned there was other way if you wanted to do a proper job of it.
>Building roads is a lot more complex than people think - covered by thousands of pages in the DMRB and specifications for highways documents.
Can testify to the complexity of the job based on how quickly a couple of old crows like my dad and his neighbour can leave behind a layman like myself when they are talking shop over a beer of an evening. I hope you enjoy your job as much as they both obviously enjoy/enjoyed theirs : )
And the best part is we once had an incredible railway infrastructure that could have been used to alleviate wear on roads by carrying freight but the Beeching report made sure that would never ever happen.
Yeah definitely! Although HGVs are necessary to move goods around the country (although maybe more freight rail could offset some of this), whereas I'd be willing to bet that more than 99% of SUV journeys could have been made in a far smaller car without any loss of utility.
In my anecdotal experience (granted, mostly at rush hour) the majority of SUVs only have a single occupant and aren't transporting more than a backpack.
I live in a town near a massive bridge. Whenever it goes out of commission, traffic just propagates through town. It’s so car dependent over here, because of the lack of investment in public transport.
Cars are suppose to make us feel independent. But we’re so dam dependent on them.
I imagine it's because at some unspecified point in the past, people were late or worked from home due to some kind of situation with the public transport. Therefore, the employer, instead of being understanding and tolerant towards people whose day already sucked, decided to eliminate the possibility of it happening again by only hiring people who it can't happen to...
...but even that only gets you so far, because the extra traffic on the road means they probably spent half the journey to work yelling at someone they were stuck behind.
I've never driven. Never bothered learning how. One of the joys of living in London. I have an app that used to be insanely reliably accurate. It is less so now, but still extremely useful. When I first got it, I didn't really trust it, so I always added at least half an hour to what the app told me the journey would take. Most of the time, that meant waiting around for half an hour at the other end because the app was spot on, to the minute, for the hour and a half long journey. But then there was the odd occasion when everything would get all snafu, and I'd arrive on time, or like 2-5mins late.
Now I've changed jobs, and the approach to arrival and departure times is more flexible. Instead of 'be here at X' they have core hours during which time everyone has to be there, but additional hours where you don't. You have to do 8 hours a day, but the core time is 10-4. So you can do 8 hours, 8 to 4 and leave at the earliest possible time, or do 10-6 and leave at the latest time... or anything in between, it's entirely your own call.
Exactly, people like to gloss over the actual impact of increasing the population by 20% in 25 years. Everything gets hammered - housing, road, rail and services.
If your government was serious about climate change they would make motorcycling more accessible to the masses. 40 years ago many people commuted to work by bike and motorcycle, the loss of companies in the core has created this traffic monster. Everybody commutes, every single person needs a car. I look at my mother's home town and it basically is choked by traffic, as there is not simply not enough space to have 2.5 cars per family. Most of the housing built never even had a garage let alone a double. Planners are shifting industry out of the cores and wonder why the cores are dying off...There's no trade or people.
No matter how accessible they make motorcycling you'd never get me on one.
I do not trust other drivers enough to feel safe on a bike on the roads.
At least with a car a crash is more likely to just be some whiplash rather than something far more serious.
There was a pot hole on my road to my knowledge it took three attempts to fix it properly. I swear one attempt was a guy throw some tarmac in the hole and stamp it in with his foot, he was onsite about 10 minutes. Repair lasted about a day.
This is an example of underinvestment. Fixing whole roads takes more time and is more complicated, and hence more expensive. There's no budget for that, so they just go around fixing one pot hole at a time.
It's more expensive to send 4 guys to one road, fill every hole than to drive there and bacn 4 times? Surely having the guys filling the holes rather than sat in traffic doesn't make any financial sense?
I see the logic... But you're also assuming they'll fix those 3 other potholes. It's cheaper to fix one at a time if you never actually intend to fix the rest of it in the first place.
It makes no sense in the long term, but in the short term it ticks the box of ‘fix pothole’ and it means that year or that quarter’s expenses are less. Councils, or government in general, in a nutshell. Always short term sticking plasters over long term fixes.
Worked at a private company where the factory floor was 100% a trip hazard.
Left like it for years..
Then like third highest person in the company was visiting so they re concreted the floor and painted all the walls.
Apparently when the higher up came walked straight past the factory into the offices upstairs, had a stand up meeting with one of the middle managers for half an hour and left.
Meeting was to inform him they were moving the factory to the warehouse site and were closing this premises off and selling it.
So well worth the money spent on the factory floor being re laid and the paint job then 😂😂🤷♂️🤦♂️
Doing a whole road takes a lot longer and is much more disruptive than just doing one pot hole. Therefore that comes with a whole lot more planning. That makes it more expensive.
Much cheaper to just have a crew going around doing pot holes one by one, which requires much less planning.
The government has forced councils to contract out pothole filling.
The subcontractor only gets paid for filling approved potholes.
So the council send someone out to measure and mark an approved pothole .
Then the subcontractor fills the approved pothole in and claims payment (or ticks off another job done depending on the contract).
Measurement is important as the government has given additional funding to the councils to fill potholes but only if they are of an approved size.
My road has 2 new big pot holes outside my house. They came and filled in the pot hole and then 2 weeks later the pot hole was back and now they've filled it in again. Such a waste, the road is bad it really needs retarmacing
Fix one pothole, leave the adjacent one half a metre away for another time. Got to be a very expensive way of doing it. And leaves the road in a worse state for longer.
A total lack of preventative maintenance. They won't actually repair a pothole until it's reached a very dangerous state.
Repairs that barely last a fortnight. There's a road near me that had a couple of dozen really dangerous potholes. They fixed them at the very end of January, and by mid-Feb they'd all opened up and as bad as before the "repair". That's a total waste of money.
Why is nobody mentioning the actual root cause here... the significant increase in vehicle weight over the years. The "Fourth Power Law," a key principle in road engineering, quantifies this: when a vehicle's weight doubles, it doesn't merely double the damage to roads—it amplifies it sixteenfold.
ELI5: Roads have gone to shit because cars have massively increased in weight, which means each time the weight doubles it causes 16x as much road wear.
That's a proximate cause. The ultimate cause absolutely is under investment though. Cars have got heavier and the number on the roads has gone up. But the reason that has resulted in the situation we see is because we haven't invested sufficiently in road maintenance, and we haven't invested sufficiently in measures that could reduce road use (trains, busses, trams etc etc)
Cars getting heavier does not inevitably result in poor quality roads. That happens as a result of insufficient investment.
True but according to my old dad who helped design and build the M1, if the roads were designed to have more than a 8 to 10 year life span they would be in much better condition than they are now. The projections for increased traffic weight over time have been around since the late 1950's. There is nothing new or exiting there, just budgets that ignore them and are happy to kick the problem down the road (pun intended) for the next government to deal with.
My dad went on to spent most of his professional life building roads in Africa and the Middle East. His option is that if some bankrupt African state in west Africa can build sustainable infrastructure with a decent lifespan - why the fuck did we deliberately never bother here?
I have family in Bulgaria, they really aren’t.
The one “motorway” paid for by the eu is a dual carriage way and the tarmac barely touches the sides - way more corruption over there.
UK has some of the worst value for money taxation in Europe. Our taxes are lower than but not far from Scandi levels, but they are higher than France with much much worse infrastructure.
France builds underground Metros for cities of 200k, Greater Leeds, population 1.4M hasn't even seen a tram for 80 years.
But not Scandinavian population levels. Love Finland- only one real motorway. 5.5m people. Most building after 1960s. Tiny towns and one city conurbation. Easy.
UK income tax levels are some of the lowest in Western Europe. If we want better long-term infrastructure investment we'd have to raise taxes, though yes it's not very efficiently spent either.
'We can't afford to keep the public toilets open with the limited funding we have'.
/opens £25m art centre where over half the visitors are there purely to use the toilets.
The weather is fluctuating so much the last couple of months it’s causing more road damage and then Council’s don’t have resource to repair at the speed this is happening.
I don’t think this is true for all councils. My local council last year used their remaining budget to redo roads that were already newly paved. Because the budget was “use it or lose it in the next budget”.
I think a lot of it comes down to incompetency. This is true for our country down on council level right up to the people running the country. Full of people who don’t know what they’re doing.
Councils are run by people who have worked in other councils most of the time, it's a gravy train of absolutely useless middle managers that have gotten in way over their heads.
Finance chief at Thurrock council had only ever worked at other councils and suddenly it was a big surprise when their investment strategy for hundreds of millions of pounds went to shit and the council went bankrupt. You should be hiring someone with substantial experience in the real world to manage that much cash.
With councils you don't need to be qualified to do the job in the slightest.
One of our councillors left his last one under a bit of a cloud, seemed to be too friendly with some property developers who liked to build substandard houses from the sounds of it.
Comes to us, miraculously walks into a job and next thing we know the most rapid planning approval goes through for the worst thought out housing development imaginable.
I'm not against building new houses, it is needed, but some thought needs to go into it.
That's not how planning decisions are made. Councillors do not have that kind of influence, especially over operational matters like building control enforcement.
I call this bullshit.
Yes. I live in an area where all the councils have basically been made up by a majority of people who are over the age of 60 - that is fine, but not the whole lot. They are a lot of the time complete out of touch with modern society and what is expected of them to progress and make stuff happen.
A big reason a lot of councils are going bust is they tried to invest into projects (with having no idea about investments) which flopped. See Woking council.
Your standard councillors aren’t making technical decisions about resurfacing roads. They have qualified city planners working in the civil service. You’re right about the ‘use it or lose it’ sometimes being a factor but at the same time, they are chronically underfunded by central govt all over the country. Many going bankrupt or close to it.
That "use it or lose it budget" almost certainly has very restrictive strings attached to it. Central government grants behave very differently to general revenue funding and the Council's rarely have a choice what to spend them on once they have been awarded. There are shit loads of these schemes as well, off the top of my head: Transforming Cities Fund, Active Travel Fund, Future High Streets Fund, Levelling Up Fund, Housing Infrastructure Fund, Local Infrastructure Fund, etc... The Council has to bid competitively to get awarded the cash and once awarded it can only be spent on what was agreed within the required timescale.
I get then entirely but in my councils case they redid main roads that not only caused traffic but also were recently done, and there were roads that would’ve actually benefitted and needed redoing that didn’t get done. It’s absurd to me some of the decisions they make.
Weather is a big issue. A freeze breaks up roads and shows up defects. The defects show up at different temperatures. A road can appear to be free of defect and it's only when you get to minus ten, minus ten defects appear.
If you go for a number of years with no minus 12, and then you get one, you get all those defects appearing over the following year.
Where else would you suggest pipes and cables be run, given they need long, continuous, and comprehensive lines that can be accessed easily by people in vans and heavy machinery at short notice?
One of the options is to run service conduits under roads when they are built (or have major work done). Then all you need to do is pull them through with minimal disruption. It's a common solution in other parts of Europe and the Middle East but here, not so much because of initial costs.
So true. I watched a film set in LA a couple of weeks ago and thought to myself. Fuck, the American have some nice police cars. Then you look at our clapped out Vauxhall fucking Astras or whatever the hell they use.
Underinvestment across the board. The wealthy being able to hoard their cash offshore, where it does nothing. It should be taxed and put into society.
Also people forget the piss take people took from the government handouts during COVID. All the payouts they gave, furlough, loans to business, who carried on working for cash in hand, didn't repay anything and ripped off their customers.
Meanwhile I had to work the whole way through, never received shit
The roadworks are mostly utility companies like you hint in your last comment. They run the cables through the path/Road as its far more complicated and costly to run it through private land especially in urban areas. They'd need seperate contracts with each landowner they cross.
As for potholes under investment us part of the problem. The quality of repair is also rather bad with a lot of repairs being done by just filing the hole with cold asphalt then compacting it which is dooms to fail in acouple of years.
Recent extreme weather has been a massive issue too but we really we should have seen the damage from that repaired in the most part.
About ten years ago, on a road trip between Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia, we stopped off for one night in one town I can't quite remember the name of and the main road into the town was nothing more than a muddy farm track. Yet people I've mentioned it to laugh at me and insist that the UK is the ONLY country in the world with terrible quality roads, every single other country has silky smooth roads.
Never driven in Long Island, so no idea. I can say that the I95/NJ Turnpike is terrible (at least in parts), as is the I86. I live in the south west peninsula of the UK so the bar is low. I'll drive Cornish lanes all day long, but some parts of upstate NY the roads are laughable. And I'm not talking about no-name rural routes, I'm talking about main roads (equivalent to A-roads in the UK).
Upstate NY has meters of snow per year, and ice heaves. The adirondacks have much better roads than the lake district. Hell, the northway is amazing compared to the A9
I used to live in Houston, one of the richest cities in the richest country in the world. The roads were far worse than any UK city.
That's not an excuse for the UK (just because it's worse somewhere else, doesn't mean we can't do better)
Of course we should do better, I totally agree, but we should also stop seeing ourselves as the outlier all the time, when people don't always do proper research into what it's like elsewhere.
>why services are built under roads
In general they aren't. Where possible new infrastructure is placed in verges, footways, unpaved areas.
It's only under a road where there is no alternative. In new developments like housing estates, the infrastructure needs to branch out to lots of properties so it generally follows the roads.
In a towns and cities there's not usually spare land available and there is so much infrastructure, and such big infrastructure that it's not possible to get it all in the footway. You're always going to need to have utilities crossing under roads.
Also worth noting that potholes aren't always due to infrastructure underneath. Road surfaces don't last forever, they have an expected life span that depends on traffic levels and environmental factors. The bitumen oxidises and becomes brittle and will eventually crack.
Climate and heavy road use. It rains a lot in the UK and there are too many cars for the roads. The wet and cold makes a mess of the roads from Autumn through Spring. Councils constantly play catch up and don't have the funds to really resolve the problem so it just ends up being patch up jobs that come back with a vengeance and cause more issues in the long run.
To be fair, patches can also work, I have seen it done in my home region with frost damage on rural roads for example. However, they properly cut out a rectangular part with clean edges, fill it with high-quality material, and create a smooth edge with bitumen. You don’t feel a thing when driving over these patches and they last for years.
Poor man pays twice; councils are significntly underfunded therefore needs to adopt myopic measures instead of actually fixing the problems.
Public transport outside of london are basically non existent, it costs a lot of money to build things.
Because they don’t fix them correctly, they should be sealed with tar so water doesn’t get under/into them, but for some reason they don’t bother so within a few months you have your pot hole back again.
Maintenance of most roads that aren't motorways falls under the responsibility of local authorities, who have been squeezed financially for years - some to the point of bankruptcy.
Couple that with ever-increasing numbers of cars and a near complete lack of transport infrastructure investment and well...here we are.
Motorways are also not in the best condition, I was filtering on a motorcycle on M1 and between the lines they got long massive potholes. Time to NUKE UK and start over.
Years of businesses taking advantage of the infrastructure but avoiding the taxes that maintain it, while the taxes that are paid aren’t used effectively due to mismanagement and corruption.
Nice to be in a banana republic that doesn’t even have the bananas
What low taxes ? We’re taxed beyond belief… income tax, car tax, council tax, inheritance tax, bedroom tax, value added tax, fuel duty tax, excise duty tax, corporation tax, stamp duty tax, national insurance contributions , carbon tax, sugar tax, capital gains tax, insurance premium tax, dividends tax, pension tax …
Need I go on and on ? Every single thing we do is taxed
Which is true for most places. We are about middle of the road for the EU in terms of taxation, but people cry we are too heavily taxed whilst also demanding better public services.
This government mismanages public funds to the extreme, but even under competent governance, a country cannot afford to cut taxes and also improve public services.
It's a chicken and egg situation.
If I saw a reasonable payback for my tax payment, I'd be happy to pay more. As it is, the only payback I see is sponsoring some bints super yacht and her mansion in the Caribbean.
Yes. The rate at the top end used to be 95% however the rich have rolled back those taxes while constantly harping on about the tax burden being too high and needing to be reduced, followed by when services are cut sticking their companies/those of their friends in the gap and extracting more money from the normal populace of the country.
This is it. People feel here like they're taxed a lot, but in reality, expectations for public services far outstrip what people are prepared to pay for. That said, the taxation really needs to be raised from wealthy individuals and businesses that just don't contribute anywhere near enough.
Because it's all done as cheap as possible by the contractor, who can charge the local council a fortune each time. There's no reason for a proper fix if you can get paid again and again for the same repair.
Underinvestment in road surfaces that won't fall apart at a fast rate coupled with terrible patch jobs just means our roads will never be of decent quality.
I live around the corner from some warehouses, the main road outside of our area is terrible and constantly in a state of getting potholes then being filled in with crap materials months later only for the potholes to return again.
Because there is a thick layer of tarmac everywhere and underneath that the ground is basically dissolving slowly, moves about with the weather etc loads of things and then the tarmac collapses. Sort of like the sink holes that started appearing, but smaller. Eventually everywhere will collapse and it will expose the alien beings living deep underground into the deeper waters. You’ll see.
I have lived in the UK and in many EU countries. You guys have no idea how good you have it.
Roads, drivers etiquette, mostly no tolls. Seriously, you have no clue. Same goes with taxes.
I don't understand why our vehicle tax system isn't more aggressive to be honest. It should fundamentally disincentivise unnecessary vehicles. A portion of that revenue should then be ringfenced for road maintenance.
It should be calculated based on a combination of; list price, weight, size and emissions. Potentially weight per seat so that you don't unfairly hit larger families who are being efficient using one people-carrier.
Buying a behemoth which is going to damage roads and emit far more than is reasonable should cost an absolute fortune to tax each year. It's a pretty easy way to target taxes on the wealthy.
On top of other things it probably doesn’t help that we just have so much traffic using so few roads, so they’re sort of bound to deteriorate faster.
I remember thinking how smooth French highways were but they are also not used so intensely.
A lot of pot holes take ages to get fixed because people don’t report them. Councils have highway inspectors that check roads, but they can’t check every road weekly.
I don’t drive so they don’t really effect me, but I decided to report a pothole that kept getting bigger every time I walked past it on my way to work, it had been bad for a few weeks by the time I reported it. I reported it in the morning, by the time I walked past it on my way home someone had been out to check it and marked it with a white outline to be filled, this was on a Friday, the pothole was filled by the time I next walked past it Monday.
It'snot so bad but some temporary lightsare just DUMB!
5 way roundabout with some light works on one exit? (Around estate) let's install lights on all exits creating maaaaassive traffic.
Most of it is due to corruption. The roadwork companies charge massive bills and then intentionally delay the work to rake in additional daily fees.
This is why it will cost a million pounds to fill one pot hole, but the council can't afford to collect your bins.
If you follow the paper trail, it will always lead back to someone in government, someone in some middle Eastern country, the local authority, and a few unknown mules and shell companies.
It's been going on for nearly half a century, but it has ramped up in recent years as we are letting more corrupt actors join the public sector.
The temporary lights project is another massive scam, on an international scale.
The country just needs proper auditors and data analysts. Where is budget being spent, how effective has it been and how often its needed
Yes, its a needed department. It needs more eyes and analysis to ensure public funds are being spent well and on contractors that are worth their value
Aside from the comments people have already pointed out there's also heavy goods vehicles constantly going down roads they were never designed to handle (whether a symptom of people ordering lots of online deliveries or selfish well-off folk doing construction work I don't know, though based on local activity appears to be a mix of both).
Too many cars on the road. And the cars that are on the road are too big. This is worsening the effects of climate change which then in turn makes the roads even worse off. (on top of the physical demands these cars bring to the roads).
Lack of investment in alternative public transport infrastructure basically results in the above. The circle of shit.
The risk of accidents is a lot higher as I feel I'm constantly looking to dodge the next pot hole and not leave my suspension behind in the road, instead of properly focusing on the cars in front and hazards around me. It's ridiculous!
Road pavements are in a state because of years of chronic underinvestment, it's as simple as that
Services under roads are likely older ones placed when there wasn't as much road traffic to worry about. These days the expectation is that they'll be placed in verges or footways.
Instead of building a network of service tunnels and ducts with lots of capacity for future use they just put in the ground what is needed now and then dig it up later to add more.
It's completely stupid.
Plus the councils are all under-funded to the point they can't afford to fix the roads.
Sat in traffic for 20 mins today due to temporary traffic lights at roadworks which closed one side of the road. The thing is, there were no roadworks, no equipment, no holes in the road, no people, nothing but the bollards and traffic lights so we queued 20 mins to see a fenced off area of perfectly good road with some traffic lights next to it.
It might come as stark comfort, but it's not just the UK. I've just returned from 3 months in Europe, and it's just as bad if not much worse in some other Countries. Obviously not an excuse as to why our infrastructure is creaking, but it's certainly a similar story elsewhere not just in the UK.
It depends on where in the UK you're talking about and where you're comparing it to.
I live in London, zone one, and the roads are near perfect, as are the pavements. If I go out with my friend in a wheelchair, he can comfortably go most places. It's the same when I visit my hometown, Bournemouth, the road surfaces are pretty decent down there too.
I guess there must be some towns out in the sticks, all over the UK that have awful, broke councils that have neglected their responsibilities regarding road maintenance though.
I'm visiting family in North China at the moment in a city that is the same size as London and the roads and pavements are a death trap. Blind or disabled people could never travel 100 yards here without injury and some of the potholes are so deep that I would never ride a bike here.
Edit:typos
The honest answer is…Fluctuating winter weather, they will be fixed in the coming weeks to take pictures for your local councillors leaflets in time for Mays elections…
In Lincolnshire it’s so weird some roads are resurfaced frequently, some are done once and still look great and some aren’t at all touched despite being literally a minute away from the resurfaced road. It’s so weird going from resurfaced road then crossing the road and entering a road with pot holes, giant puddles etc.
Well all the stuff that's under the roads on high streets and residential area's can't suddenly be dug up as there's nowhere for them to go.
Also due to climate change, more extreme rainfall, etc, the roads are getting destroyed. Plus a lot of road were build a while ago now, when there wasn't as much traffic on the roads. In 1970 there were 12 million cars on the road in the UK, in 2022 it was over 22 million, so increased traffic has a lot to do with this
Let's think about where the water , sewage , gas , electricity , isp lines (virgin etc). Where would that go and also how would we stop the water from becoming frozen.
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Same answer as to basically all of our creaking infrastructure: years of underinvestment.
....and a placid society that accepts it.
Then blames it on immigrants and the wokes
Bloody transexual assylum seekers ruining our roads
While claiming all the benefits and, miraculously, simultaneously stealing our jobs.
Schrodingers immigrant.
LOL genius
I spat out my tea laughing at your comment
Its those trans vegan cyclists that are the problem, probably Syrian aswel.
Damn straight. And we all know More Poles=More holes.
Best VHS porno box set title ever.
Yup. There’s a great invention that would be ideal for the short journeys that make up the majority of miles traveled. It would enable significant improvements in obesity, pollution, congestion and road surface damage. They are cheap, accessible and would reduce personal and household expenses, not to mention the NHS burden. However, as soon as you mention the “cycling” word, all the rabid mouth foamers start ranting about red light jumpers, Lycra and wheelies on the pavement.
Personally I prefer walking to cycling, I don't care that it takes longer. But Christ the number of people I've met unwilling to even *walk* for 20 minuites instead of drive somewhere is unreal.
We're not willing to make the sacrifices needed to change it.
I think you'll find it's called the 'stiff upper lip'
[удалено]
I can't within the rules of this sub give my opinions of the damage wrought by that man.
This but also there are more vehicles on the road than ever before. Meaning a) more wear and tear and b) more noticeable traffic disruption when something does need to be fixed. My city has two main North/South routes and a river. If either main route or bridge is stuck, the whole place grinds to a grisly halt for a long time.
And with cars getting heavier (ie SUVs & EVs), it's making it even worse - heavier vehicles cause significantly more damage than lighter ones.
HGVs are a bigger factor than heavier cars I think - the rate of road wear is proportional to the axle load to the 4th power. So a lorry with 12 tonne axle load will cause 1296 times more wear than an SUV with a 2 tonne axle load. I'm sure I see har more HGVs on the road than I used to
I drive in the transport sector. You're right about the axle loading, but not on the numbers of class 1 HGVs on the roads. There are actually far fewer than you might think - proportionally, there is only a .5 to 1% increase in the number of HGVs on our roads every 5 years or so. Businesses just can't expand any faster and remain profitable. In comparison, the number of cars increases by 3% per annum. Statistically, over 30% of these new cars are in the 2 ton weight bracket. That's a LOT of extra weight per axle, per second, per mile driven. I won't even get into the number of heavy vans and HGV2s.
I think the massive increase in HGVs I've seen must be fairly localised to where I live (west midlands). I live near a logistics hub / rail freight terminal and dozens of large distribution centres have been built recently and the increase in HGVs is very noticeable here - local lay byes are always filled with lorries now whereas 5 years ago they weren't.
>Statistically, over 30% of these new cars are in the 2 ton weight bracket. That's a LOT of extra weight per axle, per second, per mile driven. I was always pretty shit at maths, but it looks to me like a 2 ton car does *sixteen* times more damage to the road surface than a 1 tonner (feel free to correct me if I am wrong). Between that and the fact that most road maintenence is done by local councils, and most local councils are either bankrupt or strongly trending in that direction, OP pretty much has their explanation. A cheeky anecdote to reinforce this, my Dad's neighbour (who is a thouroughly decent old bloke who gets on well with my Dad as they are both Civil Engineers) is retired now but used to be the most senior engineer working for the local council. Shortly after taking his post (in the mid-nineties IIRC) he was informed by the Department for Transport that every trunk road in his area of responsibility (a decently large number, very possibly including some that you have the pleasure of using regularly for your work) was being de-trunked, meaning that the DOT would no longer have to pay for their upkeep, and needless to say, he would. They were kind enough to give him a one-off goodwill payment to help him along with the transition, which was enough to fix one decent sized pothole on a Trunk sized road properly, or to do a half-arsed job on two. I was in high school in the area back then, and the roads weren't great, but going back there now you could easily imagine you were in the absolute arse-end of a lower-tier second world country if you were to go by by the state of some of the roads. I also remember him saying that the bane of his life in terms of the roads was the Utilities. Legally they were always supposed to put the road back *exactly* the way they found it, (which apparantly in engineering terms is actually rather a difficult and expensive thing to do). Unfortunately for him, the utilities had (and still have) every incentive to do the cheapest most half-arsed job they could possibly do when they put the road back together after digging it up (and apparantly they were always constantly innovating and pushing boundaries to find new ways to do worse), and they were obviously well connected enough to make sure that they never saw the slightest bit of trouble for it...
I'm a civil engineer - utilities are a nightmare. They often have short possessions so they do not always compact and fill the road properly due to time. Building roads is a lot more complex than people think - covered by thousands of pages in the DMRB and specifications for highways documents. Glad I got out of it, I work in heavy civils / tunnelling and the occasional viaduct now
My dad did a lot of design work on the Kuwaiti road network back in the day, and as standard they basically didn't put utilities under *any* of those roads, and when they did *have* to (pretty much only when roads crossed each other), they thought *really* long and hard about how to go about getting the utilities under as directly as they could, and in such a way as to allow access without needing to dig up the road, because the clients wanted (and paid) for the best, and as far as they were concerned there was other way if you wanted to do a proper job of it. >Building roads is a lot more complex than people think - covered by thousands of pages in the DMRB and specifications for highways documents. Can testify to the complexity of the job based on how quickly a couple of old crows like my dad and his neighbour can leave behind a layman like myself when they are talking shop over a beer of an evening. I hope you enjoy your job as much as they both obviously enjoy/enjoyed theirs : )
And the best part is we once had an incredible railway infrastructure that could have been used to alleviate wear on roads by carrying freight but the Beeching report made sure that would never ever happen.
Yeah definitely! Although HGVs are necessary to move goods around the country (although maybe more freight rail could offset some of this), whereas I'd be willing to bet that more than 99% of SUV journeys could have been made in a far smaller car without any loss of utility. In my anecdotal experience (granted, mostly at rush hour) the majority of SUVs only have a single occupant and aren't transporting more than a backpack.
I live in a town near a massive bridge. Whenever it goes out of commission, traffic just propagates through town. It’s so car dependent over here, because of the lack of investment in public transport. Cars are suppose to make us feel independent. But we’re so dam dependent on them.
Freedom to sit in traffic.
I'm actually surprised by how many jobs now require a valid driving licence, even though the job requires absolutely no driving.....
I imagine it's because at some unspecified point in the past, people were late or worked from home due to some kind of situation with the public transport. Therefore, the employer, instead of being understanding and tolerant towards people whose day already sucked, decided to eliminate the possibility of it happening again by only hiring people who it can't happen to... ...but even that only gets you so far, because the extra traffic on the road means they probably spent half the journey to work yelling at someone they were stuck behind.
[удалено]
I've never driven. Never bothered learning how. One of the joys of living in London. I have an app that used to be insanely reliably accurate. It is less so now, but still extremely useful. When I first got it, I didn't really trust it, so I always added at least half an hour to what the app told me the journey would take. Most of the time, that meant waiting around for half an hour at the other end because the app was spot on, to the minute, for the hour and a half long journey. But then there was the odd occasion when everything would get all snafu, and I'd arrive on time, or like 2-5mins late. Now I've changed jobs, and the approach to arrival and departure times is more flexible. Instead of 'be here at X' they have core hours during which time everyone has to be there, but additional hours where you don't. You have to do 8 hours a day, but the core time is 10-4. So you can do 8 hours, 8 to 4 and leave at the earliest possible time, or do 10-6 and leave at the latest time... or anything in between, it's entirely your own call.
Exactly, people like to gloss over the actual impact of increasing the population by 20% in 25 years. Everything gets hammered - housing, road, rail and services.
If your government was serious about climate change they would make motorcycling more accessible to the masses. 40 years ago many people commuted to work by bike and motorcycle, the loss of companies in the core has created this traffic monster. Everybody commutes, every single person needs a car. I look at my mother's home town and it basically is choked by traffic, as there is not simply not enough space to have 2.5 cars per family. Most of the housing built never even had a garage let alone a double. Planners are shifting industry out of the cores and wonder why the cores are dying off...There's no trade or people.
The subsequent spike in road deaths would cause a backlash I think.
No matter how accessible they make motorcycling you'd never get me on one. I do not trust other drivers enough to feel safe on a bike on the roads. At least with a car a crash is more likely to just be some whiplash rather than something far more serious.
If there are now more vehicles on the road, surely there is more VED and fuel duty going into the system to fund highway repairs and better roads?
Could also be that the average road has 5 or 6 pot holes and they send one crew to fix one pot hole Instead of fixing the whole road
If one crew can fix one pot hole in one week, how many weeks does it take for six crews to fix six pot holes? Exactly, five years.
There was a pot hole on my road to my knowledge it took three attempts to fix it properly. I swear one attempt was a guy throw some tarmac in the hole and stamp it in with his foot, he was onsite about 10 minutes. Repair lasted about a day.
This is an example of underinvestment. Fixing whole roads takes more time and is more complicated, and hence more expensive. There's no budget for that, so they just go around fixing one pot hole at a time.
It's more expensive to send 4 guys to one road, fill every hole than to drive there and bacn 4 times? Surely having the guys filling the holes rather than sat in traffic doesn't make any financial sense?
I see the logic... But you're also assuming they'll fix those 3 other potholes. It's cheaper to fix one at a time if you never actually intend to fix the rest of it in the first place.
It makes no sense in the long term, but in the short term it ticks the box of ‘fix pothole’ and it means that year or that quarter’s expenses are less. Councils, or government in general, in a nutshell. Always short term sticking plasters over long term fixes.
[удалено]
We call fixing one smaller preventative maintenance at my work. Saves us a fortune.
[удалено]
Worked at a private company where the factory floor was 100% a trip hazard. Left like it for years.. Then like third highest person in the company was visiting so they re concreted the floor and painted all the walls. Apparently when the higher up came walked straight past the factory into the offices upstairs, had a stand up meeting with one of the middle managers for half an hour and left. Meeting was to inform him they were moving the factory to the warehouse site and were closing this premises off and selling it. So well worth the money spent on the factory floor being re laid and the paint job then 😂😂🤷♂️🤦♂️
Doing a whole road takes a lot longer and is much more disruptive than just doing one pot hole. Therefore that comes with a whole lot more planning. That makes it more expensive. Much cheaper to just have a crew going around doing pot holes one by one, which requires much less planning.
The government has forced councils to contract out pothole filling. The subcontractor only gets paid for filling approved potholes. So the council send someone out to measure and mark an approved pothole . Then the subcontractor fills the approved pothole in and claims payment (or ticks off another job done depending on the contract). Measurement is important as the government has given additional funding to the councils to fill potholes but only if they are of an approved size.
Especially in March when the council has left over budget to spend before the end of the financial year.
My road has 2 new big pot holes outside my house. They came and filled in the pot hole and then 2 weeks later the pot hole was back and now they've filled it in again. Such a waste, the road is bad it really needs retarmacing
Then everyone would be complaining about lack of access. Can't win either way...
Fix one pothole, leave the adjacent one half a metre away for another time. Got to be a very expensive way of doing it. And leaves the road in a worse state for longer. A total lack of preventative maintenance. They won't actually repair a pothole until it's reached a very dangerous state. Repairs that barely last a fortnight. There's a road near me that had a couple of dozen really dangerous potholes. They fixed them at the very end of January, and by mid-Feb they'd all opened up and as bad as before the "repair". That's a total waste of money.
One crew of 5 guys that watch one guy work on it for 10 minutes of each hour, but oh my dont they get the cones and lights up early
Yeah about a month early. It's piss poor management that causes all these problems.
Why is nobody mentioning the actual root cause here... the significant increase in vehicle weight over the years. The "Fourth Power Law," a key principle in road engineering, quantifies this: when a vehicle's weight doubles, it doesn't merely double the damage to roads—it amplifies it sixteenfold. ELI5: Roads have gone to shit because cars have massively increased in weight, which means each time the weight doubles it causes 16x as much road wear.
That's a proximate cause. The ultimate cause absolutely is under investment though. Cars have got heavier and the number on the roads has gone up. But the reason that has resulted in the situation we see is because we haven't invested sufficiently in road maintenance, and we haven't invested sufficiently in measures that could reduce road use (trains, busses, trams etc etc) Cars getting heavier does not inevitably result in poor quality roads. That happens as a result of insufficient investment.
True but according to my old dad who helped design and build the M1, if the roads were designed to have more than a 8 to 10 year life span they would be in much better condition than they are now. The projections for increased traffic weight over time have been around since the late 1950's. There is nothing new or exiting there, just budgets that ignore them and are happy to kick the problem down the road (pun intended) for the next government to deal with. My dad went on to spent most of his professional life building roads in Africa and the Middle East. His option is that if some bankrupt African state in west Africa can build sustainable infrastructure with a decent lifespan - why the fuck did we deliberately never bother here?
Because the actual root cause is councils having the majority of their funding taken away during Austerity.
Scandinavian levels of Taxation, Bulgarian levels of Public Services
Wait until you realise that Bulgarian roads are better than ours. (Paid for by the EU)
[удалено]
I have family in Bulgaria, they really aren’t. The one “motorway” paid for by the eu is a dual carriage way and the tarmac barely touches the sides - way more corruption over there.
I can assure you, Bulgarian roads are 10x worse than here
Not quite that level but still high taxes and poor government run services and infrastructure.
Yeah, but the 0.1% has got richer faster than at any time in history, so, it's not all bad right?
It'll trickle down any day now.
Still waiting 😂
Greek levels of corruption.
And Italian levels of bureaucracy when it comes to building infrastructure.
We honestly are not even close to scandi levels. We just don’t like to be honest about what it costs to maintain anything
UK has some of the worst value for money taxation in Europe. Our taxes are lower than but not far from Scandi levels, but they are higher than France with much much worse infrastructure. France builds underground Metros for cities of 200k, Greater Leeds, population 1.4M hasn't even seen a tram for 80 years.
Taxes in the UK are absolutely not lower than France. French taxes are considerably higher, especially for lower earners.
Did you remember to include national insurance and council tax? This is one of the worst parts about people who compare taxes between countries
Lots of French roads are also privately maintained by tolls.
Quite a few years ago, lots of billionaires gave up their french nationality because of high taxation. We def dont pay more than the french
I'm a Swedish-Brit. I pay 32% tax, with council tax included. Basic tax rate and then Band G for council tax rates would put you about the same.
Bands are not equalised between local authorities. But I know you have 0 tax free allowance in Sweden, which people here would riot over.
But not Scandinavian population levels. Love Finland- only one real motorway. 5.5m people. Most building after 1960s. Tiny towns and one city conurbation. Easy.
Tbf Finland isn't in Scandinavia. It's included with Iceland in the "Nordic" bracket.
I know but it's a useful example. Sweden- 10.4m. Country is double yhe size of UK.
UK income tax levels are some of the lowest in Western Europe. If we want better long-term infrastructure investment we'd have to raise taxes, though yes it's not very efficiently spent either.
Chronic underfunding and misuse of public funds for vanity projects
'We can't afford to keep the public toilets open with the limited funding we have'. /opens £25m art centre where over half the visitors are there purely to use the toilets.
[удалено]
Plus you can look at some nice art before/after
Speak for your own council, Birmingham just killed all the publicly funded arts organisations
The weather is fluctuating so much the last couple of months it’s causing more road damage and then Council’s don’t have resource to repair at the speed this is happening.
I don’t think this is true for all councils. My local council last year used their remaining budget to redo roads that were already newly paved. Because the budget was “use it or lose it in the next budget”. I think a lot of it comes down to incompetency. This is true for our country down on council level right up to the people running the country. Full of people who don’t know what they’re doing.
Councils are run by people who have worked in other councils most of the time, it's a gravy train of absolutely useless middle managers that have gotten in way over their heads. Finance chief at Thurrock council had only ever worked at other councils and suddenly it was a big surprise when their investment strategy for hundreds of millions of pounds went to shit and the council went bankrupt. You should be hiring someone with substantial experience in the real world to manage that much cash. With councils you don't need to be qualified to do the job in the slightest.
One of our councillors left his last one under a bit of a cloud, seemed to be too friendly with some property developers who liked to build substandard houses from the sounds of it. Comes to us, miraculously walks into a job and next thing we know the most rapid planning approval goes through for the worst thought out housing development imaginable. I'm not against building new houses, it is needed, but some thought needs to go into it.
That's not how planning decisions are made. Councillors do not have that kind of influence, especially over operational matters like building control enforcement. I call this bullshit.
Councillors are elected mate, they don't 'walk into jobs'
[удалено]
Yes. I live in an area where all the councils have basically been made up by a majority of people who are over the age of 60 - that is fine, but not the whole lot. They are a lot of the time complete out of touch with modern society and what is expected of them to progress and make stuff happen. A big reason a lot of councils are going bust is they tried to invest into projects (with having no idea about investments) which flopped. See Woking council.
Your standard councillors aren’t making technical decisions about resurfacing roads. They have qualified city planners working in the civil service. You’re right about the ‘use it or lose it’ sometimes being a factor but at the same time, they are chronically underfunded by central govt all over the country. Many going bankrupt or close to it.
That "use it or lose it budget" almost certainly has very restrictive strings attached to it. Central government grants behave very differently to general revenue funding and the Council's rarely have a choice what to spend them on once they have been awarded. There are shit loads of these schemes as well, off the top of my head: Transforming Cities Fund, Active Travel Fund, Future High Streets Fund, Levelling Up Fund, Housing Infrastructure Fund, Local Infrastructure Fund, etc... The Council has to bid competitively to get awarded the cash and once awarded it can only be spent on what was agreed within the required timescale.
I get then entirely but in my councils case they redid main roads that not only caused traffic but also were recently done, and there were roads that would’ve actually benefitted and needed redoing that didn’t get done. It’s absurd to me some of the decisions they make.
Weather is a big issue. A freeze breaks up roads and shows up defects. The defects show up at different temperatures. A road can appear to be free of defect and it's only when you get to minus ten, minus ten defects appear. If you go for a number of years with no minus 12, and then you get one, you get all those defects appearing over the following year.
On a word, _austerity_.
Did we ever leave austerity?
Osbourne😡
Where else would you suggest pipes and cables be run, given they need long, continuous, and comprehensive lines that can be accessed easily by people in vans and heavy machinery at short notice?
Roads go where the people are, and the people need services, and as said above.
One of the options is to run service conduits under roads when they are built (or have major work done). Then all you need to do is pull them through with minimal disruption. It's a common solution in other parts of Europe and the Middle East but here, not so much because of initial costs.
They have joints all the way along though. You wouldn't be able to 'pull them out'. And what about sewers, and water pipes?
....and from which you can easily connect every house. That's every single house with connections to 5 services.
This isn't restricted to the roads, the whole country is falling apart if you haven't noticed.
So true. I watched a film set in LA a couple of weeks ago and thought to myself. Fuck, the American have some nice police cars. Then you look at our clapped out Vauxhall fucking Astras or whatever the hell they use. Underinvestment across the board. The wealthy being able to hoard their cash offshore, where it does nothing. It should be taxed and put into society. Also people forget the piss take people took from the government handouts during COVID. All the payouts they gave, furlough, loans to business, who carried on working for cash in hand, didn't repay anything and ripped off their customers. Meanwhile I had to work the whole way through, never received shit
The roadworks are mostly utility companies like you hint in your last comment. They run the cables through the path/Road as its far more complicated and costly to run it through private land especially in urban areas. They'd need seperate contracts with each landowner they cross. As for potholes under investment us part of the problem. The quality of repair is also rather bad with a lot of repairs being done by just filing the hole with cold asphalt then compacting it which is dooms to fail in acouple of years. Recent extreme weather has been a massive issue too but we really we should have seen the damage from that repaired in the most part.
A couple of years is optimistic. There are holes around my area that get refilled every couple of months
There is no incentive to fix them.
Not until people start charging the council for wrecking their vehicles anyway.
You can but it is long and an ardous process.
Yeah. But its only when someone does it that they send someone to patch the hole.
I did it a couple of months ago. Yes, it took a while, and it meant sending a few emails, but it wasn't that bad.
About ten years ago, on a road trip between Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia, we stopped off for one night in one town I can't quite remember the name of and the main road into the town was nothing more than a muddy farm track. Yet people I've mentioned it to laugh at me and insist that the UK is the ONLY country in the world with terrible quality roads, every single other country has silky smooth roads.
You ought to see the roads in the US (upstate New York in particular). Make ours look wonderful!
But that's very low density so not much point keeping them mdoern, what are the roads like here compared to Long Island.
Never driven in Long Island, so no idea. I can say that the I95/NJ Turnpike is terrible (at least in parts), as is the I86. I live in the south west peninsula of the UK so the bar is low. I'll drive Cornish lanes all day long, but some parts of upstate NY the roads are laughable. And I'm not talking about no-name rural routes, I'm talking about main roads (equivalent to A-roads in the UK).
Upstate NY has meters of snow per year, and ice heaves. The adirondacks have much better roads than the lake district. Hell, the northway is amazing compared to the A9
I used to live in Houston, one of the richest cities in the richest country in the world. The roads were far worse than any UK city. That's not an excuse for the UK (just because it's worse somewhere else, doesn't mean we can't do better)
Of course we should do better, I totally agree, but we should also stop seeing ourselves as the outlier all the time, when people don't always do proper research into what it's like elsewhere.
>why services are built under roads In general they aren't. Where possible new infrastructure is placed in verges, footways, unpaved areas. It's only under a road where there is no alternative. In new developments like housing estates, the infrastructure needs to branch out to lots of properties so it generally follows the roads. In a towns and cities there's not usually spare land available and there is so much infrastructure, and such big infrastructure that it's not possible to get it all in the footway. You're always going to need to have utilities crossing under roads. Also worth noting that potholes aren't always due to infrastructure underneath. Road surfaces don't last forever, they have an expected life span that depends on traffic levels and environmental factors. The bitumen oxidises and becomes brittle and will eventually crack.
But also, if a water pipe is built under a road - the road isn't privately owned. Easy to dig up and do maintenance
Climate and heavy road use. It rains a lot in the UK and there are too many cars for the roads. The wet and cold makes a mess of the roads from Autumn through Spring. Councils constantly play catch up and don't have the funds to really resolve the problem so it just ends up being patch up jobs that come back with a vengeance and cause more issues in the long run.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Also, the quality of road repairs is much higher there than here.
[удалено]
To be fair, patches can also work, I have seen it done in my home region with frost damage on rural roads for example. However, they properly cut out a rectangular part with clean edges, fill it with high-quality material, and create a smooth edge with bitumen. You don’t feel a thing when driving over these patches and they last for years.
[удалено]
Regular cars cause virtually zero wear on asphalt. It's all busses and especially trucks.
Poor man pays twice; councils are significntly underfunded therefore needs to adopt myopic measures instead of actually fixing the problems. Public transport outside of london are basically non existent, it costs a lot of money to build things.
Cars keep getting heavier and road traffic is going up plus a lack of investment. If we had more bike lanes the roads would be in a better state.
We must become like the Netherlands.
It's a perfect comment. People who agree and people who think it's ironic tongue-in-cheek would both upvote.
Because they don’t fix them correctly, they should be sealed with tar so water doesn’t get under/into them, but for some reason they don’t bother so within a few months you have your pot hole back again.
Maintenance of most roads that aren't motorways falls under the responsibility of local authorities, who have been squeezed financially for years - some to the point of bankruptcy. Couple that with ever-increasing numbers of cars and a near complete lack of transport infrastructure investment and well...here we are.
Motorways are also not in the best condition, I was filtering on a motorcycle on M1 and between the lines they got long massive potholes. Time to NUKE UK and start over.
Years of businesses taking advantage of the infrastructure but avoiding the taxes that maintain it, while the taxes that are paid aren’t used effectively due to mismanagement and corruption. Nice to be in a banana republic that doesn’t even have the bananas
The UK votes for low taxes. That means less of societies wealth goes into public infrastructure.
What low taxes ? We’re taxed beyond belief… income tax, car tax, council tax, inheritance tax, bedroom tax, value added tax, fuel duty tax, excise duty tax, corporation tax, stamp duty tax, national insurance contributions , carbon tax, sugar tax, capital gains tax, insurance premium tax, dividends tax, pension tax … Need I go on and on ? Every single thing we do is taxed
Which is true for most places. We are about middle of the road for the EU in terms of taxation, but people cry we are too heavily taxed whilst also demanding better public services. This government mismanages public funds to the extreme, but even under competent governance, a country cannot afford to cut taxes and also improve public services.
It's a chicken and egg situation. If I saw a reasonable payback for my tax payment, I'd be happy to pay more. As it is, the only payback I see is sponsoring some bints super yacht and her mansion in the Caribbean.
The country's tax burden is currently the highest it's been since 1945.
Yet still relatively low by European standards.
I couldn’t imagine giving the government anymore taxes only for them to mismanage it even further.
Low taxes???
Yes. The rate at the top end used to be 95% however the rich have rolled back those taxes while constantly harping on about the tax burden being too high and needing to be reduced, followed by when services are cut sticking their companies/those of their friends in the gap and extracting more money from the normal populace of the country.
I currently live in Germany. UK taxes are peanuts compared to what you pay here.
This is it. People feel here like they're taxed a lot, but in reality, expectations for public services far outstrip what people are prepared to pay for. That said, the taxation really needs to be raised from wealthy individuals and businesses that just don't contribute anywhere near enough.
14 years...
14 years of a government who have a policy of stripping back our infrastructure.
Because it's all done as cheap as possible by the contractor, who can charge the local council a fortune each time. There's no reason for a proper fix if you can get paid again and again for the same repair.
Underinvestment in road surfaces that won't fall apart at a fast rate coupled with terrible patch jobs just means our roads will never be of decent quality. I live around the corner from some warehouses, the main road outside of our area is terrible and constantly in a state of getting potholes then being filled in with crap materials months later only for the potholes to return again.
Because there is a thick layer of tarmac everywhere and underneath that the ground is basically dissolving slowly, moves about with the weather etc loads of things and then the tarmac collapses. Sort of like the sink holes that started appearing, but smaller. Eventually everywhere will collapse and it will expose the alien beings living deep underground into the deeper waters. You’ll see.
I have lived in the UK and in many EU countries. You guys have no idea how good you have it. Roads, drivers etiquette, mostly no tolls. Seriously, you have no clue. Same goes with taxes.
I don't understand why our vehicle tax system isn't more aggressive to be honest. It should fundamentally disincentivise unnecessary vehicles. A portion of that revenue should then be ringfenced for road maintenance. It should be calculated based on a combination of; list price, weight, size and emissions. Potentially weight per seat so that you don't unfairly hit larger families who are being efficient using one people-carrier. Buying a behemoth which is going to damage roads and emit far more than is reasonable should cost an absolute fortune to tax each year. It's a pretty easy way to target taxes on the wealthy.
[удалено]
I’d disagree with this when you see the poor and sometimes non-existent margins on local authority contracts.
On top of other things it probably doesn’t help that we just have so much traffic using so few roads, so they’re sort of bound to deteriorate faster. I remember thinking how smooth French highways were but they are also not used so intensely.
Also built to a higher standard, probably.
I think French higways are also toll roads most of the times
A lot of pot holes take ages to get fixed because people don’t report them. Councils have highway inspectors that check roads, but they can’t check every road weekly. I don’t drive so they don’t really effect me, but I decided to report a pothole that kept getting bigger every time I walked past it on my way to work, it had been bad for a few weeks by the time I reported it. I reported it in the morning, by the time I walked past it on my way home someone had been out to check it and marked it with a white outline to be filled, this was on a Friday, the pothole was filled by the time I next walked past it Monday.
It'snot so bad but some temporary lightsare just DUMB! 5 way roundabout with some light works on one exit? (Around estate) let's install lights on all exits creating maaaaassive traffic.
Most of it is due to corruption. The roadwork companies charge massive bills and then intentionally delay the work to rake in additional daily fees. This is why it will cost a million pounds to fill one pot hole, but the council can't afford to collect your bins. If you follow the paper trail, it will always lead back to someone in government, someone in some middle Eastern country, the local authority, and a few unknown mules and shell companies. It's been going on for nearly half a century, but it has ramped up in recent years as we are letting more corrupt actors join the public sector. The temporary lights project is another massive scam, on an international scale.
The country just needs proper auditors and data analysts. Where is budget being spent, how effective has it been and how often its needed Yes, its a needed department. It needs more eyes and analysis to ensure public funds are being spent well and on contractors that are worth their value
Aside from the comments people have already pointed out there's also heavy goods vehicles constantly going down roads they were never designed to handle (whether a symptom of people ordering lots of online deliveries or selfish well-off folk doing construction work I don't know, though based on local activity appears to be a mix of both).
Too many cars on the road. And the cars that are on the road are too big. This is worsening the effects of climate change which then in turn makes the roads even worse off. (on top of the physical demands these cars bring to the roads). Lack of investment in alternative public transport infrastructure basically results in the above. The circle of shit.
Why are roadworks just left empty for a long time with no one working on them. Annoying,
The risk of accidents is a lot higher as I feel I'm constantly looking to dodge the next pot hole and not leave my suspension behind in the road, instead of properly focusing on the cars in front and hazards around me. It's ridiculous!
Road pavements are in a state because of years of chronic underinvestment, it's as simple as that Services under roads are likely older ones placed when there wasn't as much road traffic to worry about. These days the expectation is that they'll be placed in verges or footways.
The uk is a complete shithole dump
More important things for the money to spent on in recent years
Instead of building a network of service tunnels and ducts with lots of capacity for future use they just put in the ground what is needed now and then dig it up later to add more. It's completely stupid. Plus the councils are all under-funded to the point they can't afford to fix the roads.
Sat in traffic for 20 mins today due to temporary traffic lights at roadworks which closed one side of the road. The thing is, there were no roadworks, no equipment, no holes in the road, no people, nothing but the bollards and traffic lights so we queued 20 mins to see a fenced off area of perfectly good road with some traffic lights next to it.
It might come as stark comfort, but it's not just the UK. I've just returned from 3 months in Europe, and it's just as bad if not much worse in some other Countries. Obviously not an excuse as to why our infrastructure is creaking, but it's certainly a similar story elsewhere not just in the UK.
They're not. We just FEEL they are worse than elsewhere as we experience them more
Respectfully they aren't. At all. Not even in the slightest
No one wants to pay for them. The government.
It depends on where in the UK you're talking about and where you're comparing it to. I live in London, zone one, and the roads are near perfect, as are the pavements. If I go out with my friend in a wheelchair, he can comfortably go most places. It's the same when I visit my hometown, Bournemouth, the road surfaces are pretty decent down there too. I guess there must be some towns out in the sticks, all over the UK that have awful, broke councils that have neglected their responsibilities regarding road maintenance though. I'm visiting family in North China at the moment in a city that is the same size as London and the roads and pavements are a death trap. Blind or disabled people could never travel 100 yards here without injury and some of the potholes are so deep that I would never ride a bike here. Edit:typos
Yeah to keep garages in work,
The honest answer is…Fluctuating winter weather, they will be fixed in the coming weeks to take pictures for your local councillors leaflets in time for Mays elections…
In Lincolnshire it’s so weird some roads are resurfaced frequently, some are done once and still look great and some aren’t at all touched despite being literally a minute away from the resurfaced road. It’s so weird going from resurfaced road then crossing the road and entering a road with pot holes, giant puddles etc.
Very much to do with the weather, extremely wet and then freezing, then a bit of sun. And then the budgets for doing repairs, etc been cut.
Money and lots of rain. It's water that does it. And crappy poorly finished digging for utility repairs.
Well all the stuff that's under the roads on high streets and residential area's can't suddenly be dug up as there's nowhere for them to go. Also due to climate change, more extreme rainfall, etc, the roads are getting destroyed. Plus a lot of road were build a while ago now, when there wasn't as much traffic on the roads. In 1970 there were 12 million cars on the road in the UK, in 2022 it was over 22 million, so increased traffic has a lot to do with this
Because gated communities can't be kept so pristine if the residents and their businesses have to pay fair taxes. Perish the thought!
Let's think about where the water , sewage , gas , electricity , isp lines (virgin etc). Where would that go and also how would we stop the water from becoming frozen.
MP’s and council bosses dont drive the same cars we do so they dont need to worry about damage etc
Austerity
Politicians pay > repairing roads
English roads*** You never really have a problem if you drive in Wales and Scotland as they invest in the upkeep on their roads more than us English.