I find the council is a very strange organisation. When reading HJ column in the Daily Telegraph, it looks like they spend more money on compensation than they do on repairing the roads, which is mad really. I can't remember the figures though.
I always contact the council when I see a road defect. A lot of the time the councils definition of a bad road is different to mine. For me any pot hole that needs to be avioded is a major danger. And what is strange is that when I contact the council about roads they are supposed to repair, they aren't what I would call 'freindly', and I also get the impression they don't actually get many e-mails about road defects.
I am not saying all councils are like this, but in my experience they aren't really doing their job properly, which is probably caused by lack of funding most probably.
Let me give one example: I contacted the council about a large pot hole on a major road in London. They responded saying it is the responsibility of the water company as it is around a water pipe cover. They contacted them and guess what - two months later and it is still unrepaired.
I think more people with just a bit of time should e-mail them about every road defect they see. And as it damages suspension and causes accidents, they should be taken to court a lot more than they do and maybe action might be taken.
At the end of the day, the way I see it, we pay huge amounts of money on road tax and fuel duty - we should expect good roads for this. Otherwise, one wonders where this money actually goes?
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"they spend more money on compensation than they do on repairing the roads"
"they should be taken to court a lot more than they do and maybe action might be taken. "
So how do you square that circle? Budgets are limited and the highways department budget will pay for compo or repairs. More Court cases=more compensation=fewer repairs!
Our local Council have committed to spending an extra £9m this year filling potholes - I'm seeing the results already, but Council Tax went up 5% to fund it.
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It's interesting, because the state of my local authorities roads are appalling, and my C-Max has just had to have new steering and suspension bushes, as the steering was creaking. It's only done 11,000 miles!
One local dual carriageway stretch in a 40mph limit (with a speed camera too) is extremely uneven and rough. You can almost feel the suspension and tyres wearing out when you drive over them.
On the plus side the council fixed the pavement leading to the dropped kerb for my driveway recently. A large pot-hole had developed, with loose bits of concrete in it. They came to patch it the day after we notified them. While they were there they marked up numerous other pot-holes in our road for future fixing.
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It's interesting because the state of my local authorities roads are appalling and my C-Max has just had to have new steering and suspension bushes as the steering was creaking. It's only done 11 000 miles!
Hang on! In another thread you said it was a manufacturing defect and the dealer had a TSB about it?
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Hang on! In another thread you said it was a manufacturing defect and the dealer had a TSB about it?
The dealer had a TSB for part of the problem, but other suspension bushes had gone too - which is why they bodged the repair first time. I'm sure the state of the roads around here didn't help it any.
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Our local Council have committed to spending an extra £9m this year filling potholes - I'm seeing the results already but Council Tax went up 5% to fund it.
My local council is resurfacing every road in sight and I have had a 3% reduction in council tax
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"So how do you square that circle? Budgets are limited and the highways department budget will pay for compo or repairs. More Court cases=more compensation=fewer repairs!
Our local Council have committed to spending an extra £9m this year filling potholes - I'm seeing the results already, but Council Tax went up 5% to fund it."
Allow me to clarify my point. If councils were sued more, they would take action as they would see poor road surfaces as a problem (and a major one which it is). The media would make a big deal of this I am sure if millions would be spent on compensation vs. thousands on repairs (or that kind of ratio).
At present, I am sure a lot of people who have had damage to their cars or even had a road traffic accident as a result of poor roads (or where the poor road surface was a contributing factor) have not sued. Lets say they did a lot more and took action, the councils might have to start thinking more.
Also interesting is council tax payers pay for the roads. Why isn't fuel duty and road tax used for this?
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At the moment it's cheaper for Councils to leave the roads to rack and ruin and pay the relatively small amount in compensation.
These days, this is usually handled by an international law firm called Gallagher Bassett www.gallagherbassett.co.uk/
If a council usually pays £9M in compensation per annum, Gallagher Bassett will come along and do a deal to take all the claims off them for £8.5M.
The council saves £500,000, Gallagher Bassett make a killing and the old Grandmother who take a tumble gets nothing.
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I regularly report highway defects to my local council (west Berks). They have a quite sophisticated web-site for doing this. However its all very well having a good reporting mechanism, but they have a 'sticking plaster' approach to road maintenance. They always repair what I report within about a week, however what is th point of paying expensive contractors to fill in a pot-hole in a stretch of highway that is so work out that there will be more holes again in the next week or so ?
I cannot believe in the long term that these measures coupled with paying claims from motorists for tyre/wheel damage, can be economic. If only someone could take a mid-long term view and spend money now on resurfacing to save money over the next say 10 years.
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I am starting to see that the roads in Poland are slowly getting better than our roads, which is saying something really. Especially as we have a supposedly better government than the Polish and more money to spend on the roads.
It is very irresponsible and unprofessional for a government agency to operate in this way. In a way, it is like having a building that is subsiding, and instead of fixing the root of the problem, the governments approach is just to fill the cracks as they appear ? the kind of thing Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses would come up with.
On the up side, the roads aren?t terrible ? most main roads are pretty ok. And if some of the posts are right, all the roads will improve considerably in the future!
But one little thing: at the end of the financial year, councils must spend all their excess money otherwise unspent budgets are lost; the next year has a new budget and money from the old year is lost. So as we get closer to April, maybe everyone should report every road defect they remember. From experience, the whole road gets completely resurfaced!
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"they spend more money on compensation than they do on repairing the roads"
snipquote!
Don't forget we're talking Councils here, money is for wasting not spending sensibly, so the compensation approach makes sense to them.
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My local council i.e. Bromley, in the London borough of Bromley, spend a disproportionate amount of time and money on messing around with the pavements, leaving the sunken inspection covers to reap their toll on my car and other people's.
Annually, volumes of spray paint are used to mark the same road defects which, in the main, very rarely get rectified. Locally, I spend my driving time weaving in and around these horrors but can't really imagine what I must look like to those around me, who might wonder why my progress looks a trifle suspicious.
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Watching Fifth Gear on channel five, they mentioned: www.potholes.co.uk
So it seems this is in fact a big problem. Seems completely crazy that we are taxed so much and the roads are in such a mess. And over and above that, there are so many laws with regards to health and safety in the work place for example where wires aren't allowed to be all over the place in case we trip over, and yet for some reason the road is seen as a safe place and don't need this treatment.
Lets take an example: if a car has to swerve to avoid a pot hole and inadvertantly seriously injures a cyclist, would this not been seen as very dangerous?
Also strange is potholes.co.uk advertises warrantydirect: is this another example of a stealth tax (almost the same cost of a tax disc on my car).
Interesting it is again government that do this - a respectable company would never do this - and then blame lack of funds! Quite criminal really. End of rant.
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This is a handy gateway to the local authority sites:
tinyurl.com/2fhonn
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Yes HJ, but I didn't think much of the standard of repair, did you? No cutting back the ragged edges of the hole - just a temporary fill to my eyes.
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