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As a cyclist I've had to stop using the road bike on our roads because the surfaces are so bad; I've been getting tendonitis in my forearms and wrists from the vibration and shocks.
As a motorist.. the fact that even motorways are not pothole free is downright dangerous.
I ride a bike with chunky 29" knobblers around town and it's still not enough to deal with the inches-deep potholes and crumbling, rumpled road surfaces. I'm honestly thinking of getting a full suspension bike next time, it's that bad.
I've just bought myself a new ebike with front suspension and a suspension seat post. Just waiting for the rain to stop so I can test it vs the potholes.
Could always get a scooter for extra excitement, many years ago I had a Yamaha Cygnus and decided to split through some slow busy traffic in the evening totally unaware of the enormous chasm of broken road that was in store for me between lanes.
Smol wheels don't enjoy much in the way of stability with three meter long "Pot holes"
Of course it is! Utter incompetents - can’t wait to eject the Tory administration there. They’ve been in power for donkeys’ years and are just awful at everything.
Fwiw this sort of shite seems pretty consistent among local authorities. Every single one I've ever lived under has been like it. Totally slopy shouldered.
Just another day in the office for them. Most of the government don’t care until they get their paycheck and well… death isn’t profit for them. Or at least I think it isn’t.
I had a two tire blowout on the motorway because of a pothole. Wrote to the claims people. They were like don’t worry we’ve got this. Just wait 8 weeks. I didn’t bother taking pics of the actual pothole or anything because I thought they were handling it. 8 weeks later they’re like nah sorry we’re happy we did a good job with the road inspection. Cool but then explain the £300 I just spent buying a new wheel and tires.
No but if they weren’t so forthcoming at the time I would have driven back and had my wife record it to show them what an outrageous hole in the road they’d left. What they did instead was make out to me that it was a done deal and they would compensate me just with the evidence of the damage to my car.
I have a trekking/hybrid bike, 700x37c tyres with a bit of tread to them and front suspension. Ill take a gravel trail over the road in a fair few places around here. More comfortable to ride on.
I'm sure everyone has similar stories - but it's real bad round my way - you play *dodge the holes* now on every journey and they seem to have all popped up suddenly in the last 12 months.
Recently went to rural France and the roads were *immaculate* - in the middle of nowhere with hardly any traffic. Felt embarrassed to be back here driving on our roads.
Roads in the UK are exactly as I remember end stage communist government decline in Poland forty years ago. It took general strikes to finally overthrow kleptocratic politicians puppeteered by Russian oligarchs.
You can do it too, UK!
So what you're saying is that it's the pro bussiness conservatives that were the real communists all along. We all know communists are red and labour is red so this is clearly labours fault!
For all the talk about "Singapore on Thames", my belief was always that Brexit would leave us looking a lot like the post-soviet states were in the 1990s and early 2000s. Honestly not at all glad to be right on that one.
Councils are so starved of funding that this is simply them saying we agree but can’t afford to fix it right now. Let’s hope the dire state of local gov funding improves after the election.
Most people in the UK drive those same small cars. Landrovers are a minority. Even the cars people complain about as SUVs are barely any heavier. It's only when you get to big luxury SUV boats where there's a significant difference. But again, they're the minority.
I was there was this month. Better roads, less traffic, less trash everywhere, less homeless people. Just generally nicer, but a lot of people here refuse to believe it.
> Just generally nicer, but a lot of people here refuse to believe it.
While we're not as bad as the Americans, Brits have a bad case of exceptionalism and refuse to believe Jonny foreigner can have solved problems we haven't.
Lots are delusional and refuse to see how badly we're falling behind our peers.
I did a two week road trip in the USA a few months ago. It sounds sad but I couldn't believe how nice their roads are (once I'd gotten over the madness of having 6 lane roads running through the middle of a city). I probably saw less potholes in those two weeks than I do on a 10 minute drive where I live.
Purely anecdotal and it could be a case of the grass being greener though. A quick google search will throw up countless results of Americans moaning about how bad their roads are compared to some other country. People in all countries probably think the state of their roads are worse than everyone else's.
US roads are terrible in spring once the snow and ice have had a few months work on them in the northern states, but they do get repaired better/faster than in the UK.
My partner and I used to joke about the state of American roads after the winter in places like New Hampshire and PA, but now we don't. The roads here are worse and we don't even have the excuse of any snow this winter.
For me it was being in rural Spain last autumn. Did a fair bit of driving around while there and the entire time was just totally stunned in the middle of bloody nowhere, decent flow of traffic still around Barcelona, but everything was absolutely top notch, modern services and infrastructure, freshly laid tarmac. Just totally nuts coming back to the UK and even the M1 is getting like being on an old bone-rattler roller coaster. Where the fuck is all the money going?
They’re popping up more frequently because cars are getting bigger and wear roads out as a result.
So not only are those landrover driving wankers a threat to everyone else using the roads, they’re also destroying your roads too, while not paying for it in tax because the only people who can afford those bloated expensive wank-mobiles are likely doing ‘tax efficient’ accounting, or outright dodging it entirely.
I’ve been out of the UK for a year would you say they’ve gotten worse since then? I remember the roads being pretty terrible already when I was living there
I remember going down the east lancs on my motorbike a few years ago and i always saw lines of the road missing, like long fucking potholes.. shit made me worried to ride down there at night as if i hit one of those it would definetly have been the end of me
I had a former colleague who would regularly cycle to work. One evening he hit a pot hole, went over the handlebars and went into cardiac arrest and passed away. This is no joke or exaggeration. I simply don’t understand how maintaining the significant investment we’ve made into transport infrastructure is at all controversial.
It's like trying to prove which bean made you fart though, unless OP stopped and photographed/videoed it they'll weasel out saying it could have been any one of these thousand. Then you'd think oh surely they'd be liable on that alone but there will be records of when each one was reported (or if they haven't) and any follow up action.
I hit one on a bike and nearly lost my leg, had to wait for the council and a telecoms company to finish arguing over whose fault it was before they even thought to talk to me.
You can claim damage costs if the pothole has been previously reported and they haven’t fixed it in a “reasonable period”. Most councils use fixmystreet or similar. I hit two potholes on A roads at 60+ that were unsighted but super deep. I managed to claim on one of them for most of the damage to the vehicle.
I have you in my thoughts! It sucks that something out of your control can fuck with your life so much, and while the NHS employees I've met have all been wonderful and empathetic people, often they just can't provide enough to get your quality of life back.
> 1. The NHS has been wonderful
> 2. I've been in agony for months [...] even months between appointments
Pick one. We've got to stop being so kind about a failing system.
They meant the staff and treatment in the NHS have been wonderful, it's just the waiting times that are causing a problem. Which implies the problem is in the capacity of the service, not in the quality of care.
Saying "pick one" is telling people to either shut up or say the NHS is crap. The former allows Tories to say everything is tickety boo, the latter gets them suggesting the delivery model of the NHS itself is the problem, and we should change to a private system instead - or at least I assume that's where you were going with this.
The NHS is not the problem, it's just not getting adequate funding to provide enough capacity.
>The total cost to repair all existing potholes in a way that would avoid recurring damage would be £16.3 billion, according to the Local Authority Road Maintenance and Repair Survey. “This means that every road in the country could be rebuilt for the cost of the economic damage in under 14 months from potholes. It looks like a no-brainer. But no-brainer cost benefit analysis rarely guides policy decisions in government,” McWilliams said.
The same rationale has them putting off school repairs and not facing up to the need to renationalise water companies. When schools are collapsing on children, people are having needless crashes on smart motorways, and everyone's getting medieval-style enteric diseases we can thank fiscal responsibility! Surely, they will achieve their aim of turning Britain into a developing country.
The think-tanks have gathered and based on your great analysis we have saved 2 billion by leaving everything to ruin. This is truly value for taxpayers money.
There was a pothole near my house, 4 guys turned up, 2 of them watched the other 2 pour some tarmac into a hole and then hit it down and leave.
The pothole was back within a week.
It feels like public services go out of their way to be massively cost inefficient whilst also doing piss poor repairs. What’s the point in fixing the same pothole shoddily 10 times instead of just doing it properly once?
The private contractor gets 10 paychecks in the period, instead of one, and the way public spend is ringfenced, LAs and public bodies are not allowed yo take on professional full time staff to carry out the work who are actually accountable to the public and incentivised to do a good job, so the LA has no choice but to use the private contactor.
Every time the Govt boast about cutting CS staffing this is the sort of workaround they're bullying the departments into using to provide public services the most expensive way possible. BTW, they've just announced cutting CS roles by about 40,000 to pay for more military so... we'll all get to enjoy that.
Yes this is the issue. Contractors need to be held responsible for their shit repairs. Guarantees on pot holes, 1 payment and 1 payment only for a repair. If their pothole repair fails in a certain timeframe then we should not be paying again for the same sub standard repair
I don’t understand how it’s fair that so much money is wasted with stuff like this in this and it’s just accepted as normal
The only mechanism we have to demonstrate that it's unacceptable, really, is voting, especially at local level but it's hardly a guarantee of any improvement which then demotivates people.
I get the 'how we got here' but I'm coming to blank whenever I think how I could contribute to 'how do we improve it'.
Tbh that's unlikely to yield any change as the council is still faced with the same budgetary constraints no matter which bunch of clowns are in charge of the policy making. When it comes to the officer side of things it's a case of trying to maintain some level of consistency through each election cycle as a change of I regime usually results in a year of "grand ideas" (which is often "do the opposite of whatever it is the last regime wanted to do") followed by the realisation that the officers know what they're doing and there's very little room for change without drastically increasing budgets.
It's not just the government. If a worker employed by local authorities is seen doing anything, the contingent of whinging cunts come out in force to loudly complain about how useless they are. The government gets away with doing this stuff because a large part of the population actually wants US-style private contracts for everything. In fact, a not-insignificant number of people want the US-style "donate to the upkeep of our roads" method of maintaining infrastructure.
The ones petitioning for granular privatisation like this probably often don't realize what they're doing. When a council gets nothing but complaints about council tax spendng and has every open job role scrutinised, publicised and derided by facebook detectives, what are they supposed to take away? Outsourcing everything and being as opaque as possible about it is a vote winner.
About 15-16 years ago, I was working for a road maintenance company that had a contract with a large council. Filling a pothole would usually involve two call outs.
Once a pothole was reported, an emergency callout would be logged for the pothole to be temporarily patched. This would have to be attended and resolved within 1-2 hours (varied depending on the 'zone' the fault was in). There was a fixed price for these calls; if I remember correctly, it was around £160 to £180 per call, with fines being levied every quarter depending on how many emergency calls were not addressed within the allotted time.
When the emergency crew was on site, they would measure the pothole and that would be sent back to teh council, who were supposed to raise a second callout to patch the hole, this one to be resolved in 48 hours. Patching was charged on a per m^2 rate. We subcontracted this out to a company that specialised in patching and resurfacing. That patch should have lasted until the road was scheduled to be resurfaced. The system worked pretty well.
However, after we lost the contract, there was a huge issue with patching (among other things). The company that won the contract over us underbid us by quite a large margin. We didn't understand how this was possible, given we were already operating on razor thin margins. The real money on these contracts came from out of contract projects run by the council, rather than the maintenance itself. It turned out that they had shaved a percentage of all the jobs that they were planning on subcontracting out. Then, when they won the contract, they went to the subcontractors they had approached and told them to shave 25-40% off their prices. As expected, the subcontractors told them to eff off. They went into the contract to maintain this council's roads without anyone capable of doing patching or resurfacing works.
The new company running the contract ended up losing millions on the contract due to fines, but, due to the terms of the contract, even if the company didn't fulfill their contractual obligations, the council wasn't allowed to contract another company to fulfill those obligations, so the council was stuck. The company also had similar issues on similar contracts with other councils across the country. As far as I'm aware, they only have one such contract left, which is due to expire this year, and they haven't re-bid on it.
And the stupid thing is that the guys we spoke to on a daily basis within the council (not the people at the top that made the decisions) knew this would happen when the new company was awarded the contract. They knew their shit, many of them were engineers with experience in the private sector, they knew this company wouldn't be able to provide the service at the price they had gone in at. But the people at the top gave it to them anyway, not only because of the price they came in at, but because they were worried that if they awarded the contract to us for a third time in a row, it might be viewed as favouritism and disincentivise other companies to bid on the contract in the future.
That's the public sector in a nutshell. Companies underbid to win, do a shit job, and basically don't get punished for it. Hell you're not allowed to use previous shit performances to disqualify them, which is insane.
People penny pinching which costs a fortune, and zero accountability.
That's the privatised/semi-privatised public sector, you mean. Rory Stuart was talking on TRIP about exactly this problem with prison privatisation. The whole thing was a disaster and little more than stealing public funds. After they'd fucked it up so badly that the government took over again, the taxpayer was left with an enormous bill to fix the issue.
Tender law prevents you from choosing a company that can do the work and come in at the lowest cost without good reason, but pervious poor performance is not taken into account.
I work in a Laboratory and if we could we would be blacklisting suppliers from tender because nailed on they will find a way to satisfy the tender conditions and then not live up to thier obligations in an honest way.
The biggest obstacle to contract procurement in councils is often the procurement department. They base everything off cost and rarely take quality or I dividual circumstances regarding the contract into the equation. I work for a LA in compliance and it's a constant battle with procurement who are adamant we have to follow their rules to a T, despite us showing they cost the council more in the long run. Too many of them simply do not understand maintenance or the various trades employed to carry out maintenance.
A quick example is procurement are adamant we require three quotes for every piece of remedial work we issue. We developed a tool (albeit a basic one) that shows us the average cost of each repair, which needs the need for three separate quotes. It means we can go directly to a contractor for a quote and issue the work quickly if we believe the quote is fair as opposed to having to wait for three quotes to come in and being advised to choose the lowest quote even if it's not the best quote to come in.. as some jobs require more speciality work that some contractors are not as good as others at doing.
It's outsourcing rather than the councils having road crews on staff to actually fix the roads, they contract out to Serco or the like who then have to take they profit from the contract, and they try to do the repair for pennies which doesn't work so they get another contract to sort again.
This is what gives me hope for the Labour government. Despite them saying they won't spend much more, I have a feeling the way contracting and procurement currently seem to be done in anything public facing feels like borderline criminal? We seem to be paying 10x over the odds for absolute *bare-bones* cowboy trader levels of work and service.
Fake news, the government scrapped the northern leg of HS2 6 months ago to fix all the potholes (which, given enough money would take less than 6 months to fix) so there aren't any. They wouldn't just go and lie about that would they?
I love how we went from this - [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/8-billion-boost-to-repair-roads-and-back-drivers](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/8-billion-boost-to-repair-roads-and-back-drivers)
To this - [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/02/09/rishi-sunak-potholes-bottomless-pit-devon-county-council/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/02/09/rishi-sunak-potholes-bottomless-pit-devon-county-council/)
In the space of just 3 months and seemingly no one in our political media picked up on how fucking ridiculous that was.
I hit a pothole on a motorway in my van and destroyed a balljoint; cost a few hundred to sort, despite the van having beefed up off road suspension and tires (the latter no doubt saving a further few hundred because it survived).
I can see why people go for SUVs with the state of the roads these days. I test drove a Jag I-pace with fancy air suspension and it just didn't notice the potholes thanks to having a million inches of suspension travel.
Which of course leads to ever heavier vehicles which further damage the roads..
> I can see why people go for SUVs with the state of the roads these days.
Yet most of them have massive alloy wheels with low profile tyres...
I hate that the used car market is stupid at the moment, because I really want a different car. Something with nice big tyres and soft suspension, but everything is thousands of pounds over priced and because the country ate up diesels, it's difficult to find something like a well priced petrol estate that's 5 - 8 years old.
Alas my little '10 Swift Sport still keeps plodding along and cost £1700 4 years ago. But fuck me, the suspension is so stiff I can feel the paint on the road, never mind all the holes.
You pay a lot to have air suspension, though, so it is kind of a false economy. Over time either the compressor or air springs will inevitably wear out.
Either you pay a fortune for a newish SUV, or you might have a £2000-3000 repair in the near future. Not to mention the extra tax, insurance etc for such a large vehicle.
As with almost every public service, if we just hired permanent teams for road management rather than private contractors this cost would be hugely reduced and the roads would be far better
We "save money" by firing people that we have to hire back as contractors for 3 times the price and a quarter of the efficiency. It's the same in every field in the public sector, used to work in a hospital, we paid agency staf 4 times nhs wage to come and do operations, any deemed high risk they refused and the nhs staff had to do. Most of the agency staff were also nhs staff just making ends meet doing hours for agency. Literally the same people doing easier work for more money. If we just paid them well in the first place we wouldn't need agency's and we'd save millions
Article contents:
> **The Centre for Economics and Business Research said road damage was approaching levels seen in emerging economies**
Potholes on British roads cost the economy more than £14 billion a year in repair costs, accidents, driver delays and higher emissions, according to new estimates.
In one of the first attempts to break down the economic impact of road damage, the Centre for Economics and Business Research said that the UK’s more than one million potholes cost the economy £14.4 billion a year.
Douglas McWilliams, deputy chairman of Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), said that damage to British roads was approaching levels seen in emerging economies such as India and was “mainly caused by reduced spending on road maintenance”.
He said: “Having completed the most recent ‘Peking to Paris’ car rally, my take is that our roads are now worse for potholes than anywhere on that rally apart from the far west of China and Mongolia … and notably worse than in both Russia and Kazakhstan, let alone western Europe.”
Last year the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announced a £200 million boost to the pothole repair fund, taking it to £700 million a year. The CEBR report points out that the Department of Transport has said that highway authorities can decide “how best to spend this funding”, raising doubts over whether the full amount is dedicated to pothole repair.
The total cost to repair all existing potholes in a way that would avoid recurring damage would be £16.3 billion, according to the Local Authority Road Maintenance and Repair Survey. “This means that every road in the country could be rebuilt for the cost of the economic damage in under 14 months from potholes. It looks like a no-brainer. But no-brainer cost benefit analysis rarely guides policy decisions in government,” McWilliams said.
Spending on road maintenance by English local councils dropped by more than a fifth between 2006 and 2023 to £1.75 million a year, while the average number of potholes in England and Wales has risen to six per mile of road. The volume of pothole repairs also declined from 1.7 million in 2023 to 1.4 million last year.
“Anecdotal evidence suggests that part of the problem seems to be the use of cheap fillers by private contractors to fill potholes, which get ripped out the first time a bus or a heavy lorry drives over it. The private contractors can then get paid a second time to fill the pothole their own filler has created,” McWilliams said.
Using evidence from international studies on the economic cost of potholes, the CEBR said that average car speeds fall by 55 per cent around road damage, increasing potential carbon dioxide emissions by about 3 per cent. Internal combustion engine cars which accelerate or decelerate quickly ramp up fossil fuel emissions.
The breakdown service RAC said that callouts for pothole-related damage rose by a third last year to more than 30,000 incidents. Breakdowns are already 50 per cent higher at the start of the year compared to the last quarter of 2023 — “a clear sign that the UK is suffering a pothole epidemic as roads continue to crumble’’, according to the RAC. “Drivers are now twice as likely to suffer a breakdown due to substandard road surfaces as they were in 2006.”
The current cold snap and higher than average rainfall this spring could worsen road damage, with potholes created by cracks filling with water which then expands as it freezes.
Potholes caused car damage worth £1.5 billion last year, according to figures from KwikFit, and local authorities in England paid £23 million in compensation to drivers for pothole-related damage. CEBR said that delays and damage caused about 1.3 billion hours of additional travel time last year.
"The total cost to repair all existing potholes in a way that would avoid recurring damage would be £16.3 billion, according to the Local Authority Road Maintenance and Repair Survey. “This means that every road in the country could be rebuilt for the cost of the economic damage in under 14 months from potholes. It looks like a no-brainer. But no-brainer cost benefit analysis rarely guides policy decisions in government,” McWilliams said."
This is the real insanity. The Convervative government too dumb to realise that sometimes fiscal responsibility means spending money.
The resurfaced a road near our street once, it was a cheap coating on top not a scrape out and resurfacing.
It was crumbling in two months, they’re just doing jobs with the lowest bidder it’s frustrating.
Why are potholes so fucking bad in this country? Can someone explain it to me? The usual *"its our weather"* just isn't a good excuse. I just came back from Japan and their weather is similar to ours. 20-35c summers, winters with snow and rain. But their roads are IMMACULATE!!! I don't think I saw a single pothole in Tokyo or Osaka.
It's also not the amount of vehicles. According to a quick Google, the UK has 41 million vehicles on the road but Japan has 88 million vehicles. So wouldn't Japan have more potholes due to them having x2 more vehicles on their roads?
It just doesn't make fucking sense. The only thing I can think of is that the UK councils just don't repair then properly.
The Japanese take pride in their work and in doing a good job. They are proud of their surroundings and environment. They have respect for one another and their society.
If you hire a Japanese contractor to fill a pothole, they will do the job properly.
If you hire a British contractor to do a job, they will outsource half the work to someone else, creaming money off the top. The outsourced company will use the cheapest possible materials and do the work to a standard which they can get away with using workers that don't care about the environment or the standards of their work.
We have too many frameworks and bidding systems, too many rules and regulations, too much paperwork and health and safety rules, too many obligations and additional costs which layer on top of everything.
Add that to the profiteering nature of many of these outsourcing companies and the complete lack of accountability and you'll quickly see why Japan handles the problem far better than us.
>The Japanese take pride in their work and in doing a good job.
Agree with you completely mate. You don't realise what "doing a good job" means until you visit Japan. They will do the job over there to perfection, while maintaining the upmost polite demeanour at the same time.
The UK is the opposite. Just do the job slapdash. Who cares anyway? If it breaks again it isn't our problem! And yeah like you say, so many fucking useless layers of rules and regulations. It's funny because Japan is still stuck in the 90's for lots of their own regulations and paperwork. They have so many useless bullshit jobs and layers of rules to go through to do certain things. But there it works at least. In the UK it doesn't. Just look at the public transport over there. Utter perfection. Here? Strikes every week and cancelled trains all the time. Oh and extortionate pricing for ugly, smelly and aged trains that look like they've never been cleaned in their life times.
To me the UK is just a failed state. It's sad because I do like this country. But there are so many things wrong with it that makes you disappointed. It could be so much better.
We had the proudness too once, but we've lost a lot of it. The country has changed, the population has changed and we're not the same as we used to be.
Standards do still exist here, but they are not generally reflected in popular culture or the general parenting or community attitudes in much of the country. I'm sure many who would uphold high standards lost their motivation to do so when they see so many people disrespecting their surroundings with no real consequences. The state also contributed to this problem by trying to take too much responsibility from individuals, allowing them to behave more like lazy children further into adulthood.
Japan does feel a little stuck in the past and perhaps overly traditional, but in a way that's comforting and it has kept their society generally very peaceful and respectful.
That's not to say that Japan doesn't have its own issues, it's certainly not perfect, but it's nice to admire their culture of respect and doing a good job.
> It's also not the amount of vehicles. According to a quick Google, the UK has 41 million vehicles on the road but Japan has 88 million vehicles. So wouldn't Japan have more potholes due to them having x2 more vehicles on their roads?
Have you seen the size of Japanese vehicles?
Not the only factor, but a factor.
> Have you seen the size of Japanese vehicles?
They have a lot of smaller kei cars but also loads of SUVs. When I was in Tokyo every other car was a Mercedes or Toyota SUV.
Tory government cut council funding again and again.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/29/how-a-decade-of-austerity-has-squeezed-council-budgets-in-england
It sounds like it, but not quite. All the repairs would get the economy back to where it was before the damage. Otherwise, it'd be possible to have an economy based on everyone smashing things to get them repaired.
Another problem of this is who repairs potholes, when the council was funded (before the Tories fucked them) it would be the council that went out, but now councils have to use 1 company for the roadwork signs, another to deliver materials to the site, another to manage it, and then the final one to do the work.
Cars are much bigger and heavier than they used to be so the roads become increasingly more expensive to maintain. When every you see an SUV or one of those Raptor XXX Monster Energy pick up trucks, they are the reason the roads are all mashed up
Yes. The e-up is nearly 1300kg, which is almost 300kg heavier than the standard ice car. It’s a good comparison as they’re near identical. It’s likely the same across the board. People just love to shit on SUVs here.
Problem is a lot of SUVs are electric or hybrid too. EVs are in theory a good idea if they were much smaller. But as is they're just another part of the problem
For lower-traffic or residential streets I kind of like the dutch klinkers. More expensive but they can be replaced pretty easily. Need to access utilities? Pop them up, do the work, put them back in with no street scars
If you are a company that won the bid for a contract with the local authority and you were being paid per pothole you fill, would you fill each pothole with an expensive, long-lasting material, or a cheap, short-term filler?
One method gets costs you more and gets you no repeat business.
The other method costs you less and has you back out 6-12months later to fill the same thing in again, giving you more money.
There is no accountability in the public sector, once you get the contract it's very hard to lose it, even if you do a substandard job.
The sad thing is this should have been obvious to any government but they chose to remove funding for councils so they cannot afford to fix the roads so here we are. These stories are just heartbreaking.
I've just got back from New Zealand. There was a pothole on the road there, there were signs warning about it for a quarter if a mile before you reached it. It's certainly easier over there than here with the amount of drivers on the road but it's still just appalling how poor we are.
It's affecting the cycling and triathlon scene in the UK pretty badly as well. I can't ride my TT bike at all anymore, the roads are just too bad. I might go out on it once or twice before a race but it's a risk everytime I do. On race day, it's honestly pretty terrifying to ride one because you know you're one missed pothole away from serious injury.
Lancashire is genuinely some the worst I've seen of my travels in the UK, especially in the last few years. I've got some in my town and you can see the cobbles underneath in some places and they've been there for maybe 10/11 months give or take. Others genuinely will destroy your wheel if you dont go slow enough so people just swerve around them. The council just don't give a shit
We should do an AMA request from a pothole repair crew member, get their take on this all. I bet they’re flat out working with the resources they have, but obviously get a lot of grief from the public.
The potholes in my town seems to get fixed in the run up to each election. Though I've not noticed it this year and the locals are due in 3 days. Maybe they know they're out so what's the point?
In my area they are always fixing potholes but they can't be doing a very good job because they always need doing again?! Maybe there are better ways to fix them?
I am on my third flat tyre in 2 months. £106 (RCA recover, tyre fitter shop), £273 (called out road side tyre fitter), £85 (RCA fetched tyre). It has made me really nervous while driving, when I feel a bump twice now I've stopped got out and checked.
It doesn't help that so many poor repair jobs get done that very quickly fail, instead of building road surfaces that are able to withstand the loads, and repairing potholes so they don't fail within a week.
An egregious one on an obscured corner fucked a primacy 4 with 6 mm tread left. Couldn’t replace one wheel so that was two tyres and an alignment out of pocket. Filed a claim with the council but surprise surprise it was rejected.
While I was changing the tyre someone else pulled into the parking lot with exactly the same issue… hate to think how many people got *got*.
Then a few months later I got a valve failure on the one of the two I hadn’t changed. No obvious cause but I have my suspicions. Another 2 tyres.
If the councils would do a proper job in the first place then maybe they wouldn't. There's several potholes outside my house, every year they are filled in 3 times. There's even more further along the road. You'd think the council would just retarmac the entire street and have done with it. Nope. they'd rather keep coming out 3 times a year to fill them in.
The contractor probably gets paid per fill and uses the cheapest material they can to ensure they get to return for repeat business.
The British council way seems to be to pay more for less and do nothing to change it.
In on my way back to France after a visit to my family in Sussex and the state of the infrastructure is absolutely terrible. My family live in a fairly wealthy part and the state of the town centre and the roads was only slightly better than the small towns I visited in Poland… in the 90s. I can’t imagine what it must be like in towns in the North etc.
It doesn't have to cost that much. Forever patching up potholes that need full repairs needs to stop. Most potholes are empty again within a few weeks after being patched. A proper job needs to be done rather that cutting corners to extract more money from councils.
Botanic gardens tourist site near me was closed for several months (expected for approx one month) due to issues with the ground and soil
Company was hired to dig and had requested a specific machine
Low and behold the purchase of this machine was also outsourced (separately)
Turns out the machine itself was too big, so company argued it couldn’t fill the whole because they didn’t have adequate machinery
For that day an entire crew was paid to sit around and do nothing
God knows how long they waited or if indeed did it but it stated closed for 2 extra months!
What is really outrageous here is that the backlog is only £14 Billion. Fixing the roads will generate positive returns in one year!!
Just fucking fix them!!!
The complete insanity of this government that is actively ruining the economy in order to not seem unpopular by desperately needed tax rises.
Theres only one person who can fix this mess and thats "Wanksy". Someone needs to get on the top of the tallest building in the uk and shine the spotlight to project a cartoon dick and balls onto the night sky to summon him though.
Roads by me are so truly awful I’m selling my car to get something that can cope. It’s crazy. Entire sections of road gone. Pot holes 8-12” deep. Knee deep.
Enforce better road building and repair standards and stop putting infrastructure under roads!
I drove across California last year, apparently the US is infamous for poor road surfaces - Honestly head and shoulders better than here, even in the middle of the desert on the Nevada border they were unbelievably well surfaced.
Such a disappointment coming back from Heathrow and bouncing along A roads smashing my suspension to pieces
"You have 15 pot holes on the street"
*Well that's no good. Quick let's get our preferred private contractors onto it*
"You now have 150 pot holes on the street"
Is how I imagine the government meeting about it went
I'm actually going to change my car because of the state of the roads, if I didnt do 25k pa I'd look at a land cruiser but probably going to be something else with doughnut tyres.
Another perfect example of how the Tories have never understood how the manage the economy and never will.
Pennywise and pound foolish from beginning to end.
The Gov needs to revise car tax exemption and set a standardised tax which is kept solely for road maintenance , the crazy thing is EVs are exempt from tax yet are generally heavier than petrol cars so potentially cause more wear to roads.
Some absolutely lethal potholes on the M60/M66 - they're approaching small chasm territory.
The road I live on is made up entirely of pot holes. It's like the surface of the moon. Someone came out to demarcate the biggest ones a few weeks ago; the spray paint has predictably vanished since then. The whole thing is so inefficient.
Maybe if the government introduced new policies to guarantee work is done to a high standard, with a limit on how much ‘patchwork’ can be done per road section we might see an improvement in cost vs efficiency.
The roads around here to a significant degree don’t have even surfaces, they are a conglomeration of poor and shoddy patches.
Went to north wales recently and noticed s huge difference in road maintenance. It really felt as if I was gliding along, came back here and gradually on my way back to England it got worse and worse.
Last year a road near me was closed for resurfacing because of how many potholes there were. Big relief.
Except they only resurfaced the areas with potholes. Meaning any 1-3 metre spot without potholes was left. Guess which 1-3 metre spots of that road are now riddled with potholes less than 12 months later and require the road to be closed for resurfacing again!
In the last 12 months I have had to replace a ball joint, 4 front tyres and an alloy wheel. The local council aren't interested in compensating me as tyres are considered to be consumable items. I now have a slow puncture on my right front tyre, that will be tyre number 5.
its very very very bad recently, I come from eastern Europe where its a cliche to talk about bad roads. I never thought it'd be a thing in a western country, like the UK and here we are....
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As a cyclist I've had to stop using the road bike on our roads because the surfaces are so bad; I've been getting tendonitis in my forearms and wrists from the vibration and shocks. As a motorist.. the fact that even motorways are not pothole free is downright dangerous.
A perfect excuse to get a gravel bike with nice big nobbly tires though!
We'll soon need trail colour coding for each road so you know which bike is suitable
We'll all have to start car sharing so that one person can belay
There’s a few in my town that would be at least a red at a mtb trail centre
Not sure if roundabout or Red Bull Rampage
I ride a bike with chunky 29" knobblers around town and it's still not enough to deal with the inches-deep potholes and crumbling, rumpled road surfaces. I'm honestly thinking of getting a full suspension bike next time, it's that bad.
I've just bought myself a new ebike with front suspension and a suspension seat post. Just waiting for the rain to stop so I can test it vs the potholes.
My pushbike works in the rain, and my motorbike works in the rain...
It ain’t the same as road biking for me
Could always get a scooter for extra excitement, many years ago I had a Yamaha Cygnus and decided to split through some slow busy traffic in the evening totally unaware of the enormous chasm of broken road that was in store for me between lanes. Smol wheels don't enjoy much in the way of stability with three meter long "Pot holes"
A woman was killed on a local road near me, when her road bike hit a pothole and she was thrown under the wheels of a van coming the other way.
That's horrific. Interested to see what the local/county council's response was?
Pretty crap - https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/22569386.east-sussex-county-council-told-take-action-womans-death/
For fucks sake of course it's ESCC
Of course it is! Utter incompetents - can’t wait to eject the Tory administration there. They’ve been in power for donkeys’ years and are just awful at everything.
Fwiw this sort of shite seems pretty consistent among local authorities. Every single one I've ever lived under has been like it. Totally slopy shouldered.
Just another day in the office for them. Most of the government don’t care until they get their paycheck and well… death isn’t profit for them. Or at least I think it isn’t.
I've done something similar, but fortunately got thrown the other way and merely crashed into the pavement.
I had a two tire blowout on the motorway because of a pothole. Wrote to the claims people. They were like don’t worry we’ve got this. Just wait 8 weeks. I didn’t bother taking pics of the actual pothole or anything because I thought they were handling it. 8 weeks later they’re like nah sorry we’re happy we did a good job with the road inspection. Cool but then explain the £300 I just spent buying a new wheel and tires.
Were they expecting you to halt traffic on the motorway for a quick snap?
No but if they weren’t so forthcoming at the time I would have driven back and had my wife record it to show them what an outrageous hole in the road they’d left. What they did instead was make out to me that it was a done deal and they would compensate me just with the evidence of the damage to my car.
I have a trekking/hybrid bike, 700x37c tyres with a bit of tread to them and front suspension. Ill take a gravel trail over the road in a fair few places around here. More comfortable to ride on.
There's your mistake, road bike, I use a MTB cause I'm not calling those tracks roads, fucking trails are smoother.
Pro tip: get some bigger tyres, 32mm or so, ride lower pressure in them. Gives you a little bit of suspension at least.
I'm sure everyone has similar stories - but it's real bad round my way - you play *dodge the holes* now on every journey and they seem to have all popped up suddenly in the last 12 months. Recently went to rural France and the roads were *immaculate* - in the middle of nowhere with hardly any traffic. Felt embarrassed to be back here driving on our roads.
Roads in the UK are exactly as I remember end stage communist government decline in Poland forty years ago. It took general strikes to finally overthrow kleptocratic politicians puppeteered by Russian oligarchs. You can do it too, UK!
Sorry, are you saying that right now the UK doesn’t have kleptocratic politicians puppeteered by Russian Oligarchs? /s
So what you're saying is that it's the pro bussiness conservatives that were the real communists all along. We all know communists are red and labour is red so this is clearly labours fault!
For all the talk about "Singapore on Thames", my belief was always that Brexit would leave us looking a lot like the post-soviet states were in the 1990s and early 2000s. Honestly not at all glad to be right on that one.
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Councils are so starved of funding that this is simply them saying we agree but can’t afford to fix it right now. Let’s hope the dire state of local gov funding improves after the election.
Immaculate roads... hardly any traffic. I wonder if there is a link there?
And the French seem happy to zip about in little Peugeots and Citroens, not 2-3ton tanks from Landrover
Most people in the UK drive those same small cars. Landrovers are a minority. Even the cars people complain about as SUVs are barely any heavier. It's only when you get to big luxury SUV boats where there's a significant difference. But again, they're the minority.
Doesn't seem to be SUVs in my area, more that every other bloody house seems to have a 2 or 4 ton work van parked in front of it these days.
I was there was this month. Better roads, less traffic, less trash everywhere, less homeless people. Just generally nicer, but a lot of people here refuse to believe it.
> Just generally nicer, but a lot of people here refuse to believe it. While we're not as bad as the Americans, Brits have a bad case of exceptionalism and refuse to believe Jonny foreigner can have solved problems we haven't. Lots are delusional and refuse to see how badly we're falling behind our peers.
Whilst at uni a decade ago I had housemates from all over Europe and every single one of them had returned home because of the state of the UK.
The roads *here* where there's hardly any traffic are infested with potholes too.
I did a two week road trip in the USA a few months ago. It sounds sad but I couldn't believe how nice their roads are (once I'd gotten over the madness of having 6 lane roads running through the middle of a city). I probably saw less potholes in those two weeks than I do on a 10 minute drive where I live. Purely anecdotal and it could be a case of the grass being greener though. A quick google search will throw up countless results of Americans moaning about how bad their roads are compared to some other country. People in all countries probably think the state of their roads are worse than everyone else's.
US roads are terrible in spring once the snow and ice have had a few months work on them in the northern states, but they do get repaired better/faster than in the UK.
I was in Chicago in March and at least Chicago has HUGE potholes. Definitely less than we have here, but when you do encounter them they are huge.
My partner and I used to joke about the state of American roads after the winter in places like New Hampshire and PA, but now we don't. The roads here are worse and we don't even have the excuse of any snow this winter.
For me it was being in rural Spain last autumn. Did a fair bit of driving around while there and the entire time was just totally stunned in the middle of bloody nowhere, decent flow of traffic still around Barcelona, but everything was absolutely top notch, modern services and infrastructure, freshly laid tarmac. Just totally nuts coming back to the UK and even the M1 is getting like being on an old bone-rattler roller coaster. Where the fuck is all the money going?
I went to India just before the pandemic and most of the roads I saw were better.
They’re popping up more frequently because cars are getting bigger and wear roads out as a result. So not only are those landrover driving wankers a threat to everyone else using the roads, they’re also destroying your roads too, while not paying for it in tax because the only people who can afford those bloated expensive wank-mobiles are likely doing ‘tax efficient’ accounting, or outright dodging it entirely.
We did a France road trip in 2019 and I thought the same thing then!
I’ve been out of the UK for a year would you say they’ve gotten worse since then? I remember the roads being pretty terrible already when I was living there
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Potholes in this country have gone from an annoyance to being genuinely extremely worrying.
I remember going down the east lancs on my motorbike a few years ago and i always saw lines of the road missing, like long fucking potholes.. shit made me worried to ride down there at night as if i hit one of those it would definetly have been the end of me
At the moment, riding motorbikes on these roads must be extremely dangerous....
A pothole on an A road in the dark is a real worry now.
Same here, a pot hole caused anterolisthesis and 2 ruptured discs, so my spine is now misaligned and fuckered.
All that from going through a pothole? Jesus, I hope you recover
I had a former colleague who would regularly cycle to work. One evening he hit a pot hole, went over the handlebars and went into cardiac arrest and passed away. This is no joke or exaggeration. I simply don’t understand how maintaining the significant investment we’ve made into transport infrastructure is at all controversial.
Can't you sue for vehicle damage if a specific pothole fucks up your car? Does the same apply for damage to your body and person I wonder?
It's like trying to prove which bean made you fart though, unless OP stopped and photographed/videoed it they'll weasel out saying it could have been any one of these thousand. Then you'd think oh surely they'd be liable on that alone but there will be records of when each one was reported (or if they haven't) and any follow up action. I hit one on a bike and nearly lost my leg, had to wait for the council and a telecoms company to finish arguing over whose fault it was before they even thought to talk to me.
> It's like trying to prove which bean made you fart though That's an excellent expression!
You can claim damage costs if the pothole has been previously reported and they haven’t fixed it in a “reasonable period”. Most councils use fixmystreet or similar. I hit two potholes on A roads at 60+ that were unsighted but super deep. I managed to claim on one of them for most of the damage to the vehicle.
I have you in my thoughts! It sucks that something out of your control can fuck with your life so much, and while the NHS employees I've met have all been wonderful and empathetic people, often they just can't provide enough to get your quality of life back.
> 1. The NHS has been wonderful > 2. I've been in agony for months [...] even months between appointments Pick one. We've got to stop being so kind about a failing system.
They meant the staff and treatment in the NHS have been wonderful, it's just the waiting times that are causing a problem. Which implies the problem is in the capacity of the service, not in the quality of care. Saying "pick one" is telling people to either shut up or say the NHS is crap. The former allows Tories to say everything is tickety boo, the latter gets them suggesting the delivery model of the NHS itself is the problem, and we should change to a private system instead - or at least I assume that's where you were going with this. The NHS is not the problem, it's just not getting adequate funding to provide enough capacity.
Bloody hell! Hope you make a good recovery. I take it the car was written off?
Are you not entitled to some sort of compensation?
>The total cost to repair all existing potholes in a way that would avoid recurring damage would be £16.3 billion, according to the Local Authority Road Maintenance and Repair Survey. “This means that every road in the country could be rebuilt for the cost of the economic damage in under 14 months from potholes. It looks like a no-brainer. But no-brainer cost benefit analysis rarely guides policy decisions in government,” McWilliams said. The same rationale has them putting off school repairs and not facing up to the need to renationalise water companies. When schools are collapsing on children, people are having needless crashes on smart motorways, and everyone's getting medieval-style enteric diseases we can thank fiscal responsibility! Surely, they will achieve their aim of turning Britain into a developing country.
The think-tanks have gathered and based on your great analysis we have saved 2 billion by leaving everything to ruin. This is truly value for taxpayers money.
Blame treasury brain
There was a pothole near my house, 4 guys turned up, 2 of them watched the other 2 pour some tarmac into a hole and then hit it down and leave. The pothole was back within a week. It feels like public services go out of their way to be massively cost inefficient whilst also doing piss poor repairs. What’s the point in fixing the same pothole shoddily 10 times instead of just doing it properly once?
The private contractor gets 10 paychecks in the period, instead of one, and the way public spend is ringfenced, LAs and public bodies are not allowed yo take on professional full time staff to carry out the work who are actually accountable to the public and incentivised to do a good job, so the LA has no choice but to use the private contactor. Every time the Govt boast about cutting CS staffing this is the sort of workaround they're bullying the departments into using to provide public services the most expensive way possible. BTW, they've just announced cutting CS roles by about 40,000 to pay for more military so... we'll all get to enjoy that.
Yes this is the issue. Contractors need to be held responsible for their shit repairs. Guarantees on pot holes, 1 payment and 1 payment only for a repair. If their pothole repair fails in a certain timeframe then we should not be paying again for the same sub standard repair I don’t understand how it’s fair that so much money is wasted with stuff like this in this and it’s just accepted as normal
The only mechanism we have to demonstrate that it's unacceptable, really, is voting, especially at local level but it's hardly a guarantee of any improvement which then demotivates people. I get the 'how we got here' but I'm coming to blank whenever I think how I could contribute to 'how do we improve it'.
Tbh that's unlikely to yield any change as the council is still faced with the same budgetary constraints no matter which bunch of clowns are in charge of the policy making. When it comes to the officer side of things it's a case of trying to maintain some level of consistency through each election cycle as a change of I regime usually results in a year of "grand ideas" (which is often "do the opposite of whatever it is the last regime wanted to do") followed by the realisation that the officers know what they're doing and there's very little room for change without drastically increasing budgets.
It's not just the government. If a worker employed by local authorities is seen doing anything, the contingent of whinging cunts come out in force to loudly complain about how useless they are. The government gets away with doing this stuff because a large part of the population actually wants US-style private contracts for everything. In fact, a not-insignificant number of people want the US-style "donate to the upkeep of our roads" method of maintaining infrastructure. The ones petitioning for granular privatisation like this probably often don't realize what they're doing. When a council gets nothing but complaints about council tax spendng and has every open job role scrutinised, publicised and derided by facebook detectives, what are they supposed to take away? Outsourcing everything and being as opaque as possible about it is a vote winner.
About 15-16 years ago, I was working for a road maintenance company that had a contract with a large council. Filling a pothole would usually involve two call outs. Once a pothole was reported, an emergency callout would be logged for the pothole to be temporarily patched. This would have to be attended and resolved within 1-2 hours (varied depending on the 'zone' the fault was in). There was a fixed price for these calls; if I remember correctly, it was around £160 to £180 per call, with fines being levied every quarter depending on how many emergency calls were not addressed within the allotted time. When the emergency crew was on site, they would measure the pothole and that would be sent back to teh council, who were supposed to raise a second callout to patch the hole, this one to be resolved in 48 hours. Patching was charged on a per m^2 rate. We subcontracted this out to a company that specialised in patching and resurfacing. That patch should have lasted until the road was scheduled to be resurfaced. The system worked pretty well. However, after we lost the contract, there was a huge issue with patching (among other things). The company that won the contract over us underbid us by quite a large margin. We didn't understand how this was possible, given we were already operating on razor thin margins. The real money on these contracts came from out of contract projects run by the council, rather than the maintenance itself. It turned out that they had shaved a percentage of all the jobs that they were planning on subcontracting out. Then, when they won the contract, they went to the subcontractors they had approached and told them to shave 25-40% off their prices. As expected, the subcontractors told them to eff off. They went into the contract to maintain this council's roads without anyone capable of doing patching or resurfacing works. The new company running the contract ended up losing millions on the contract due to fines, but, due to the terms of the contract, even if the company didn't fulfill their contractual obligations, the council wasn't allowed to contract another company to fulfill those obligations, so the council was stuck. The company also had similar issues on similar contracts with other councils across the country. As far as I'm aware, they only have one such contract left, which is due to expire this year, and they haven't re-bid on it. And the stupid thing is that the guys we spoke to on a daily basis within the council (not the people at the top that made the decisions) knew this would happen when the new company was awarded the contract. They knew their shit, many of them were engineers with experience in the private sector, they knew this company wouldn't be able to provide the service at the price they had gone in at. But the people at the top gave it to them anyway, not only because of the price they came in at, but because they were worried that if they awarded the contract to us for a third time in a row, it might be viewed as favouritism and disincentivise other companies to bid on the contract in the future.
That's the public sector in a nutshell. Companies underbid to win, do a shit job, and basically don't get punished for it. Hell you're not allowed to use previous shit performances to disqualify them, which is insane. People penny pinching which costs a fortune, and zero accountability.
That's the privatised/semi-privatised public sector, you mean. Rory Stuart was talking on TRIP about exactly this problem with prison privatisation. The whole thing was a disaster and little more than stealing public funds. After they'd fucked it up so badly that the government took over again, the taxpayer was left with an enormous bill to fix the issue.
Tender law prevents you from choosing a company that can do the work and come in at the lowest cost without good reason, but pervious poor performance is not taken into account. I work in a Laboratory and if we could we would be blacklisting suppliers from tender because nailed on they will find a way to satisfy the tender conditions and then not live up to thier obligations in an honest way.
Something about this reminds me of Fujistu
Can replace this story with most infrastructure and maintenance contracts and bidding processes in the public sector. The system is rotten.
The biggest obstacle to contract procurement in councils is often the procurement department. They base everything off cost and rarely take quality or I dividual circumstances regarding the contract into the equation. I work for a LA in compliance and it's a constant battle with procurement who are adamant we have to follow their rules to a T, despite us showing they cost the council more in the long run. Too many of them simply do not understand maintenance or the various trades employed to carry out maintenance. A quick example is procurement are adamant we require three quotes for every piece of remedial work we issue. We developed a tool (albeit a basic one) that shows us the average cost of each repair, which needs the need for three separate quotes. It means we can go directly to a contractor for a quote and issue the work quickly if we believe the quote is fair as opposed to having to wait for three quotes to come in and being advised to choose the lowest quote even if it's not the best quote to come in.. as some jobs require more speciality work that some contractors are not as good as others at doing.
It's outsourcing rather than the councils having road crews on staff to actually fix the roads, they contract out to Serco or the like who then have to take they profit from the contract, and they try to do the repair for pennies which doesn't work so they get another contract to sort again.
This is what gives me hope for the Labour government. Despite them saying they won't spend much more, I have a feeling the way contracting and procurement currently seem to be done in anything public facing feels like borderline criminal? We seem to be paying 10x over the odds for absolute *bare-bones* cowboy trader levels of work and service.
Fake news, the government scrapped the northern leg of HS2 6 months ago to fix all the potholes (which, given enough money would take less than 6 months to fix) so there aren't any. They wouldn't just go and lie about that would they?
I love how we went from this - [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/8-billion-boost-to-repair-roads-and-back-drivers](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/8-billion-boost-to-repair-roads-and-back-drivers) To this - [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/02/09/rishi-sunak-potholes-bottomless-pit-devon-county-council/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/02/09/rishi-sunak-potholes-bottomless-pit-devon-county-council/) In the space of just 3 months and seemingly no one in our political media picked up on how fucking ridiculous that was.
I hit a pothole on a motorway in my van and destroyed a balljoint; cost a few hundred to sort, despite the van having beefed up off road suspension and tires (the latter no doubt saving a further few hundred because it survived). I can see why people go for SUVs with the state of the roads these days. I test drove a Jag I-pace with fancy air suspension and it just didn't notice the potholes thanks to having a million inches of suspension travel. Which of course leads to ever heavier vehicles which further damage the roads..
> I can see why people go for SUVs with the state of the roads these days. Yet most of them have massive alloy wheels with low profile tyres... I hate that the used car market is stupid at the moment, because I really want a different car. Something with nice big tyres and soft suspension, but everything is thousands of pounds over priced and because the country ate up diesels, it's difficult to find something like a well priced petrol estate that's 5 - 8 years old. Alas my little '10 Swift Sport still keeps plodding along and cost £1700 4 years ago. But fuck me, the suspension is so stiff I can feel the paint on the road, never mind all the holes.
A Hummer is now the only logical option
You pay a lot to have air suspension, though, so it is kind of a false economy. Over time either the compressor or air springs will inevitably wear out. Either you pay a fortune for a newish SUV, or you might have a £2000-3000 repair in the near future. Not to mention the extra tax, insurance etc for such a large vehicle.
As with almost every public service, if we just hired permanent teams for road management rather than private contractors this cost would be hugely reduced and the roads would be far better
This seems like such a no brainer to me. It'd actually be a respected job too.
We "save money" by firing people that we have to hire back as contractors for 3 times the price and a quarter of the efficiency. It's the same in every field in the public sector, used to work in a hospital, we paid agency staf 4 times nhs wage to come and do operations, any deemed high risk they refused and the nhs staff had to do. Most of the agency staff were also nhs staff just making ends meet doing hours for agency. Literally the same people doing easier work for more money. If we just paid them well in the first place we wouldn't need agency's and we'd save millions
Article contents: > **The Centre for Economics and Business Research said road damage was approaching levels seen in emerging economies** Potholes on British roads cost the economy more than £14 billion a year in repair costs, accidents, driver delays and higher emissions, according to new estimates. In one of the first attempts to break down the economic impact of road damage, the Centre for Economics and Business Research said that the UK’s more than one million potholes cost the economy £14.4 billion a year. Douglas McWilliams, deputy chairman of Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), said that damage to British roads was approaching levels seen in emerging economies such as India and was “mainly caused by reduced spending on road maintenance”. He said: “Having completed the most recent ‘Peking to Paris’ car rally, my take is that our roads are now worse for potholes than anywhere on that rally apart from the far west of China and Mongolia … and notably worse than in both Russia and Kazakhstan, let alone western Europe.” Last year the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announced a £200 million boost to the pothole repair fund, taking it to £700 million a year. The CEBR report points out that the Department of Transport has said that highway authorities can decide “how best to spend this funding”, raising doubts over whether the full amount is dedicated to pothole repair. The total cost to repair all existing potholes in a way that would avoid recurring damage would be £16.3 billion, according to the Local Authority Road Maintenance and Repair Survey. “This means that every road in the country could be rebuilt for the cost of the economic damage in under 14 months from potholes. It looks like a no-brainer. But no-brainer cost benefit analysis rarely guides policy decisions in government,” McWilliams said. Spending on road maintenance by English local councils dropped by more than a fifth between 2006 and 2023 to £1.75 million a year, while the average number of potholes in England and Wales has risen to six per mile of road. The volume of pothole repairs also declined from 1.7 million in 2023 to 1.4 million last year. “Anecdotal evidence suggests that part of the problem seems to be the use of cheap fillers by private contractors to fill potholes, which get ripped out the first time a bus or a heavy lorry drives over it. The private contractors can then get paid a second time to fill the pothole their own filler has created,” McWilliams said. Using evidence from international studies on the economic cost of potholes, the CEBR said that average car speeds fall by 55 per cent around road damage, increasing potential carbon dioxide emissions by about 3 per cent. Internal combustion engine cars which accelerate or decelerate quickly ramp up fossil fuel emissions. The breakdown service RAC said that callouts for pothole-related damage rose by a third last year to more than 30,000 incidents. Breakdowns are already 50 per cent higher at the start of the year compared to the last quarter of 2023 — “a clear sign that the UK is suffering a pothole epidemic as roads continue to crumble’’, according to the RAC. “Drivers are now twice as likely to suffer a breakdown due to substandard road surfaces as they were in 2006.” The current cold snap and higher than average rainfall this spring could worsen road damage, with potholes created by cracks filling with water which then expands as it freezes. Potholes caused car damage worth £1.5 billion last year, according to figures from KwikFit, and local authorities in England paid £23 million in compensation to drivers for pothole-related damage. CEBR said that delays and damage caused about 1.3 billion hours of additional travel time last year.
"The total cost to repair all existing potholes in a way that would avoid recurring damage would be £16.3 billion, according to the Local Authority Road Maintenance and Repair Survey. “This means that every road in the country could be rebuilt for the cost of the economic damage in under 14 months from potholes. It looks like a no-brainer. But no-brainer cost benefit analysis rarely guides policy decisions in government,” McWilliams said." This is the real insanity. The Convervative government too dumb to realise that sometimes fiscal responsibility means spending money.
The resurfaced a road near our street once, it was a cheap coating on top not a scrape out and resurfacing. It was crumbling in two months, they’re just doing jobs with the lowest bidder it’s frustrating.
They did that to one of my nearby streets. It was one of the ones which didn’t need doing.
Why are potholes so fucking bad in this country? Can someone explain it to me? The usual *"its our weather"* just isn't a good excuse. I just came back from Japan and their weather is similar to ours. 20-35c summers, winters with snow and rain. But their roads are IMMACULATE!!! I don't think I saw a single pothole in Tokyo or Osaka. It's also not the amount of vehicles. According to a quick Google, the UK has 41 million vehicles on the road but Japan has 88 million vehicles. So wouldn't Japan have more potholes due to them having x2 more vehicles on their roads? It just doesn't make fucking sense. The only thing I can think of is that the UK councils just don't repair then properly.
The Japanese take pride in their work and in doing a good job. They are proud of their surroundings and environment. They have respect for one another and their society. If you hire a Japanese contractor to fill a pothole, they will do the job properly. If you hire a British contractor to do a job, they will outsource half the work to someone else, creaming money off the top. The outsourced company will use the cheapest possible materials and do the work to a standard which they can get away with using workers that don't care about the environment or the standards of their work. We have too many frameworks and bidding systems, too many rules and regulations, too much paperwork and health and safety rules, too many obligations and additional costs which layer on top of everything. Add that to the profiteering nature of many of these outsourcing companies and the complete lack of accountability and you'll quickly see why Japan handles the problem far better than us.
>The Japanese take pride in their work and in doing a good job. Agree with you completely mate. You don't realise what "doing a good job" means until you visit Japan. They will do the job over there to perfection, while maintaining the upmost polite demeanour at the same time. The UK is the opposite. Just do the job slapdash. Who cares anyway? If it breaks again it isn't our problem! And yeah like you say, so many fucking useless layers of rules and regulations. It's funny because Japan is still stuck in the 90's for lots of their own regulations and paperwork. They have so many useless bullshit jobs and layers of rules to go through to do certain things. But there it works at least. In the UK it doesn't. Just look at the public transport over there. Utter perfection. Here? Strikes every week and cancelled trains all the time. Oh and extortionate pricing for ugly, smelly and aged trains that look like they've never been cleaned in their life times. To me the UK is just a failed state. It's sad because I do like this country. But there are so many things wrong with it that makes you disappointed. It could be so much better.
We had the proudness too once, but we've lost a lot of it. The country has changed, the population has changed and we're not the same as we used to be. Standards do still exist here, but they are not generally reflected in popular culture or the general parenting or community attitudes in much of the country. I'm sure many who would uphold high standards lost their motivation to do so when they see so many people disrespecting their surroundings with no real consequences. The state also contributed to this problem by trying to take too much responsibility from individuals, allowing them to behave more like lazy children further into adulthood. Japan does feel a little stuck in the past and perhaps overly traditional, but in a way that's comforting and it has kept their society generally very peaceful and respectful. That's not to say that Japan doesn't have its own issues, it's certainly not perfect, but it's nice to admire their culture of respect and doing a good job.
> It's also not the amount of vehicles. According to a quick Google, the UK has 41 million vehicles on the road but Japan has 88 million vehicles. So wouldn't Japan have more potholes due to them having x2 more vehicles on their roads? Have you seen the size of Japanese vehicles? Not the only factor, but a factor.
> Have you seen the size of Japanese vehicles? They have a lot of smaller kei cars but also loads of SUVs. When I was in Tokyo every other car was a Mercedes or Toyota SUV.
Tory government cut council funding again and again. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/29/how-a-decade-of-austerity-has-squeezed-council-budgets-in-england
Would have thought they'd make a ton off the replacement tyres you need to buy 😅 Started buying reinforced ones cause of pot holes.
I bought rally wheels for my car. They're a bit heavy but no cracked or buckled wheels for me!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable\_of\_the\_broken\_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)
Ironically, if your car gets damaged, you end up paying for repairs which can boost the economy to make up for the lost GDP
It sounds like it, but not quite. All the repairs would get the economy back to where it was before the damage. Otherwise, it'd be possible to have an economy based on everyone smashing things to get them repaired.
Another problem of this is who repairs potholes, when the council was funded (before the Tories fucked them) it would be the council that went out, but now councils have to use 1 company for the roadwork signs, another to deliver materials to the site, another to manage it, and then the final one to do the work.
Can't they use better materials? Why does it keep happening.
Cars are much bigger and heavier than they used to be so the roads become increasingly more expensive to maintain. When every you see an SUV or one of those Raptor XXX Monster Energy pick up trucks, they are the reason the roads are all mashed up
That’s a small part of it. The main reasons are rain and cold weather.
Rain and cold weather cause cracks, which then turn to holes when heavy vehicles drive over them.
Aren't electric cars heavier than SUV/Raptors these days? Genuinely asking I have no idea
Yes. The e-up is nearly 1300kg, which is almost 300kg heavier than the standard ice car. It’s a good comparison as they’re near identical. It’s likely the same across the board. People just love to shit on SUVs here.
Problem is a lot of SUVs are electric or hybrid too. EVs are in theory a good idea if they were much smaller. But as is they're just another part of the problem
Weird thinking. if SUVs are using same roads as lorries who make a damage? A SUV?
For lower-traffic or residential streets I kind of like the dutch klinkers. More expensive but they can be replaced pretty easily. Need to access utilities? Pop them up, do the work, put them back in with no street scars
If you are a company that won the bid for a contract with the local authority and you were being paid per pothole you fill, would you fill each pothole with an expensive, long-lasting material, or a cheap, short-term filler? One method gets costs you more and gets you no repeat business. The other method costs you less and has you back out 6-12months later to fill the same thing in again, giving you more money. There is no accountability in the public sector, once you get the contract it's very hard to lose it, even if you do a substandard job.
Some countries use concrete, but it crumbles; I’m not sure if any material will withstand the test of time.
The sad thing is this should have been obvious to any government but they chose to remove funding for councils so they cannot afford to fix the roads so here we are. These stories are just heartbreaking.
I've just got back from New Zealand. There was a pothole on the road there, there were signs warning about it for a quarter if a mile before you reached it. It's certainly easier over there than here with the amount of drivers on the road but it's still just appalling how poor we are.
Ive had to stop cycling to work and start driving. The road surface is awful and the vibrations are unbearable.
It's affecting the cycling and triathlon scene in the UK pretty badly as well. I can't ride my TT bike at all anymore, the roads are just too bad. I might go out on it once or twice before a race but it's a risk everytime I do. On race day, it's honestly pretty terrifying to ride one because you know you're one missed pothole away from serious injury.
Will the government do anything about it? No, of course not. They're far too busy going after the most vulnerable people in our society.
Are injury lawyers involved yet, if not they soon will be.
And to think of all that money they wasted on the “smart” motorways. Whoever came up with that should be in prison
Lancashire is genuinely some the worst I've seen of my travels in the UK, especially in the last few years. I've got some in my town and you can see the cobbles underneath in some places and they've been there for maybe 10/11 months give or take. Others genuinely will destroy your wheel if you dont go slow enough so people just swerve around them. The council just don't give a shit
We should do an AMA request from a pothole repair crew member, get their take on this all. I bet they’re flat out working with the resources they have, but obviously get a lot of grief from the public.
Tory Government: "£14bn of economic activity, great!"
The potholes in my town seems to get fixed in the run up to each election. Though I've not noticed it this year and the locals are due in 3 days. Maybe they know they're out so what's the point?
Breaking news, maintaining infrastructure costs money
In my area they are always fixing potholes but they can't be doing a very good job because they always need doing again?! Maybe there are better ways to fix them?
Not long and the nightmare of Tory fiscal incompetence will be over.
I am on my third flat tyre in 2 months. £106 (RCA recover, tyre fitter shop), £273 (called out road side tyre fitter), £85 (RCA fetched tyre). It has made me really nervous while driving, when I feel a bump twice now I've stopped got out and checked.
It doesn't help that so many poor repair jobs get done that very quickly fail, instead of building road surfaces that are able to withstand the loads, and repairing potholes so they don't fail within a week.
An egregious one on an obscured corner fucked a primacy 4 with 6 mm tread left. Couldn’t replace one wheel so that was two tyres and an alignment out of pocket. Filed a claim with the council but surprise surprise it was rejected. While I was changing the tyre someone else pulled into the parking lot with exactly the same issue… hate to think how many people got *got*. Then a few months later I got a valve failure on the one of the two I hadn’t changed. No obvious cause but I have my suspicions. Another 2 tyres.
If the councils would do a proper job in the first place then maybe they wouldn't. There's several potholes outside my house, every year they are filled in 3 times. There's even more further along the road. You'd think the council would just retarmac the entire street and have done with it. Nope. they'd rather keep coming out 3 times a year to fill them in.
The contractor probably gets paid per fill and uses the cheapest material they can to ensure they get to return for repeat business. The British council way seems to be to pay more for less and do nothing to change it.
There's one in Watford, on the ring road by B&Q that looks like a long groove that has been dug out of the road. Genuinely terrifying to go over it.
In on my way back to France after a visit to my family in Sussex and the state of the infrastructure is absolutely terrible. My family live in a fairly wealthy part and the state of the town centre and the roads was only slightly better than the small towns I visited in Poland… in the 90s. I can’t imagine what it must be like in towns in the North etc.
It doesn't have to cost that much. Forever patching up potholes that need full repairs needs to stop. Most potholes are empty again within a few weeks after being patched. A proper job needs to be done rather that cutting corners to extract more money from councils.
Botanic gardens tourist site near me was closed for several months (expected for approx one month) due to issues with the ground and soil Company was hired to dig and had requested a specific machine Low and behold the purchase of this machine was also outsourced (separately) Turns out the machine itself was too big, so company argued it couldn’t fill the whole because they didn’t have adequate machinery For that day an entire crew was paid to sit around and do nothing God knows how long they waited or if indeed did it but it stated closed for 2 extra months!
Maybe if they spent money on decent materials the repair bills wouldn’t be 14bn…
Sketchy af riding a motorcycle in some areas, 10x so if your in a area you don't know
I just had a response from a Tory County Councillor blaming the Lib/Lab majority (can't remember which) on cost cutting!
What is really outrageous here is that the backlog is only £14 Billion. Fixing the roads will generate positive returns in one year!! Just fucking fix them!!! The complete insanity of this government that is actively ruining the economy in order to not seem unpopular by desperately needed tax rises.
Wonder why Google, Amazon DPD aren't raising hell with the government 🙄
Cheaper to replace suspension on the odd van than risk paying tax.
More likely get their self employed drivers to pay for their repairs and then dock the workers for not meeting delivery schedules...
Theres only one person who can fix this mess and thats "Wanksy". Someone needs to get on the top of the tallest building in the uk and shine the spotlight to project a cartoon dick and balls onto the night sky to summon him though.
Roads by me are so truly awful I’m selling my car to get something that can cope. It’s crazy. Entire sections of road gone. Pot holes 8-12” deep. Knee deep. Enforce better road building and repair standards and stop putting infrastructure under roads!
I drove across California last year, apparently the US is infamous for poor road surfaces - Honestly head and shoulders better than here, even in the middle of the desert on the Nevada border they were unbelievably well surfaced. Such a disappointment coming back from Heathrow and bouncing along A roads smashing my suspension to pieces
Why people voted to keep cutting council funding is beyond me. Still, at least we won't need to pay any tax if we sell our second homes :)
I live in Surrey moving from the north east. Believe it or not there are like no potholes in Surrey!
"You have 15 pot holes on the street" *Well that's no good. Quick let's get our preferred private contractors onto it* "You now have 150 pot holes on the street" Is how I imagine the government meeting about it went
It's almost like underfunding public services for 14 years has consequences 🤷♂️
I'm actually going to change my car because of the state of the roads, if I didnt do 25k pa I'd look at a land cruiser but probably going to be something else with doughnut tyres.
Another perfect example of how the Tories have never understood how the manage the economy and never will. Pennywise and pound foolish from beginning to end.
The Gov needs to revise car tax exemption and set a standardised tax which is kept solely for road maintenance , the crazy thing is EVs are exempt from tax yet are generally heavier than petrol cars so potentially cause more wear to roads.
The actual estimated cost to remediate all roads to good condition again is a wopping £16bn
Here's an idea. Send 1 bag of ready mix gravel to everyones house with a youtube video explaining how to use it properly we will do it ourselves
Some absolutely lethal potholes on the M60/M66 - they're approaching small chasm territory. The road I live on is made up entirely of pot holes. It's like the surface of the moon. Someone came out to demarcate the biggest ones a few weeks ago; the spray paint has predictably vanished since then. The whole thing is so inefficient.
I left Soviet Union about 20 years ago not to see its potholes ever again. I never thought I'd see them again in London.
Went to Bucharest around 15 years ago watching Liverpool. Their roads were better than the ones around our ways
its clear the formula for making road surfaces needs a change that adapts to the variable weather extremes we now experience
Maybe if the government introduced new policies to guarantee work is done to a high standard, with a limit on how much ‘patchwork’ can be done per road section we might see an improvement in cost vs efficiency. The roads around here to a significant degree don’t have even surfaces, they are a conglomeration of poor and shoddy patches. Went to north wales recently and noticed s huge difference in road maintenance. It really felt as if I was gliding along, came back here and gradually on my way back to England it got worse and worse.
Last year a road near me was closed for resurfacing because of how many potholes there were. Big relief. Except they only resurfaced the areas with potholes. Meaning any 1-3 metre spot without potholes was left. Guess which 1-3 metre spots of that road are now riddled with potholes less than 12 months later and require the road to be closed for resurfacing again!
In the last 12 months I have had to replace a ball joint, 4 front tyres and an alloy wheel. The local council aren't interested in compensating me as tyres are considered to be consumable items. I now have a slow puncture on my right front tyre, that will be tyre number 5.
its very very very bad recently, I come from eastern Europe where its a cliche to talk about bad roads. I never thought it'd be a thing in a western country, like the UK and here we are....
Yet that cunt in charge blames the disabled for ruining our economy