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Why is it that there is so much emphasis put on drivers to keep a good tread on their tyres when local autorities are allowed to let roads get in a bald condition with nothing said to them. A worn tyre on a good rough road surface will pull up just as fast as a good tyre on a very worn shiny wet road surface. While I do not advocate that drivers should travel on bald tyres there should be some sort of law for local authoroties to comply with by having skid tests on their worn road surfaces as well, and if they are below a set level they should be fined and made put right the surface to a proper safe condition. They put up "slippery road" signs every few miles to cover themselves, can you imagine a car driver travelling around with a sign on four sides of his car saying bald tyres?
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Very good humour. Original?
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Sorry, if you found it funny, it wasn't intended to be. It's a subject I feel very strongly about, the atrocious condition of our road surfaces, our lives depend on it in the same way as tyres.
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u are right
the manarins who run our public services are just about totally unaccountable, and they all run through their fashions (tower blocks in the 60's, and speed cameras today) with next to no check from the silent majority
on the whole however road surfaces in the uk are much more grippy than in some other countries, for instance in chicago where the temperature extremes (it has much colder winters than here, and much much hotter summers) means the compound they can use to build the road must cope with expansion in such temperature ranges... in practise this means less grippy surfaces, which is one reason why even decent sports cars on wide tyres will slide easily in the US whereas they would stick to the road like glue here....
but back to the mandarins, i would also like to see a few of them in court for designing some road systems so dangerously that they cause accidents...
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Sorry if your unintentional humour made me laugh. I must say though that in the real world, many roads aren't perfect. Most of us make allowances for varying conditions, and I, for one, appreciate any warning of a slippery road surface.
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Dangerous road systems - best example I saw was a village in Oxfordshire where a series of chicanes was introduced to reduce speed. The chicanes were marked with iron bollards, but as it was in a conservation area someone in authority decreed that the bollards had to be painted matt black, so they were not obtrusive. Due to the same conservation rules there was very little street lighting. Can you guess what happened next?
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On the subject of dangerous road layouts - the Petersfield bypass has a couple of very bad examples. The Ham Barn roundabout has claimed about 15 lorry tip-overs since it was opened - execrable design, pear-shaped with the curve tightening up suddenly. Also a turnoff at Longmoor with a 40 yard deceleration lane before a more-than-right angled bend.
I'm sure that every Backroomer could cite examples of this sort of thing. Don't road layout designers have rules to follow?
Peter.
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Not to mention the traffic calming through Greatham - resident(s) must have friends in high places for the council to blow that much money there?
As for the Ham Barn roundabout, I seem to remember that the local paper article said that something like 60% of the lorry tip-overs were vehicles from the same firm - surely there's a connection to be made here, but seems to be beyond the authorities.
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Attempts were made to set up a similar sounding chicane near me. First the metal frames for the new bollards were bolted to the road surface. Presumably the intention was to fill these with concrete but within a day the buses had flattened all the frames.
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Just watch out for the pot holes on the A12! Some are several inches deep. However no expense is spared and there are a good coverage of speed cameras where safety work is being done at a snails pace.
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Provided you use the same route each day you learn where the pot holes are!
However, I've hit a few on the m'bike and they can be spine-jarring.
I know someone who lost a leg by being thrown off a moped by a pot hole.
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