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Ours are getting filled, but to me the problem seems to be that the "fillings" are not very robust...
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Exactly the same here - bag of tarmac solution, sort of half halfheartedly compacted.
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Same here, poor quality quick fixes that will not last long.
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Seems to be a similarity of fixing methods. All equally financially challenged?
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Don't know whats to do, but i'm of the opinion that our roads will deteriorate progressively over the next number of years and far worse than they are now.
It may be case of self help, specifying our cars and tyre/wheel choices to suit our future roads.
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That will upset the anti 4X4 people. :)
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Doesn't have to be 4x4 Navy, and i for one don't want to have to explain to the peoples committee here the reasons why i should be granted permission to buy another..''you want more boy''..;)
I'm thinking of how certain cars stand out as perfectly able to cope with almost any road surface you throw at them...Berlingo stands out by a mile but i found Note impressive too for example...sensible 65 aspect tyres and long travel suspension helping no end.
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its the sheer number of them thats the problem, from what I see there are 100s of them per mile, its an exercise in logistics and speed as much as anything else.
In the old days, great care was taken in sealing up the aftermath in roadworks, care was taken to pour tar round the joins and cracks to ensure water did not enter.
It doesent happen now, a hole is filled with rough tarmac and thats all. You cant blame the council for that, that is due to the slipshod of work of the utilities who dig them up in the first place.
They should be forced to guarantee the quality of their work, if it breaks up within 5 years they should be forced to rectify it.
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Doesn't have to be 4x4 Navy and i for one don't want to have to explain to the peoples committee here the reasons why i should be granted permission to buy another..
If the road quality continues to deteriorate, which it will, with a lack of maintenance and continued poor repairs, in 5 to 10 years we will have third world comparable road surfaces. The average car will not withstand that treatment for long no matter what wheels and tyres it is fitted with. You would need something built like a 1930's Bentley or a 4x4.
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You would need something built like a 1930's Bentley or a 4x4.
A lot of Chelsea Tractors have low profile tyres, which will make the wheels very vulnerable to damage when going over a pothole.
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A lot of Chelsea Tractors have low profile tyres which will make the wheels very vulnerable to damage when going over a pothole.
>>
Chelsea tractor drivers have more money than sense, drug dealer wheels are their problem. Real world 4X4's will be OK.
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I've noticed quite a few holes that weren't there before the freeze. Even the bigger wheels and tyres on the Suzi get a real jolt from some of them. I hate to think what these are doing to inch thick sports tyres on alloys. Worse, some of them are a real threat to bikers. I can see a few serious ' offs ' happening in our area, I've been making a mental note of the worse ones.
I hope no-one seeing me weaving around them thinks I've been at the grog !
Ted
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Most potholes I see in County Durham are filled within a few days, so hats off to the council for that.
As regards budgets, for all the good they do, I'd sack 20 teachers, save 10 wages and put 10 extra men on road maintenance.
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Most potholes I see in County Durham are filled within a few days so hats off to the council for that. As regards budgets for all the good they do I'd sack 20 teachers save 10 wages and put 10 extra men on road maintenance.
Theres a double bonus from sacking teachers because in ten years time there will be more unqualified blokes eager to work on the roads! Why squander money on educating people?
Serously though, roads in my corner of the world are being patched up OK, they seem to be getting to the jobs quickly. Wife complained to the council that there was a lot of litter building up in our village and to their credit they were out the next day with a pick up and some litter pickers, cant complian at all.
Anything with very low profile tyres will poss get damaged by potholes, they are only a fashion item anyway. Still with sensible wheels and tyres.
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yes good idea, you would then generate 3,000 undeducated and skillless boys who are only capable of working on road mending gangs.
If they were not keying your car, stealing your radio or spraying graffiti over your front door.
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...yes good idea...
We are straying a bit here, but there are any number of comprehensives where few pupils emerge with any meaningful qualifications.
I don't blame the teachers, there is a significant number of young people - who know their rights - who refuse to be educated, so why bother trying?
Education - and social services - sucks up a large percentage of a local authority's budget.
So, getting back to motoring, I genuinely believe some of that money could be usefully diverted to highways/environment.
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I thought they were doing well in the Southend area until I discovered the roadworks teams were not filling potholes but creating new 'speed bumps' !
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I have come across a large amount of potholes in the Darlington area and have used fixmystreet.com to report them.
Darlington Council (separate from Durham Council) seem to be quick if you point out that it will cost them if you don?t
Last year at the end of my street there where huge holes in the road that covered the entire with of my street, the car used to bounce into them and thump about in the very wide in diameter hole. It was terrible really.
After putting up with it a month or so I used the site to report it and I got a email back from the council saying that it was in their plan for refurbishment in 2010 and if I looked closer I would see that the area was already spray marked out (I did look closer and it wasn?t)
I emailed back pointing this out, also pointing (politely) out that as I have already reported it and it was the only entrance to my street, should my suspension break as a result. I will be having manufacturer fitted repairs and the council will be billed for it
2 days later the pothole was completely repaired!
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It's a good point about utility companies and the like failing to make good repairs to road surfaces after they have dug them up for cables and pipes. A few times in the past couple of years in my area, a beautifully smooth, recently resurfaced road has been butchered to lay pipes or cables, and the repair afterwards has been woefully inadequate. Most of the potholes to appear from under the recent snow melt in these parts have occurred around these badly repaired/replaced sections of tarmac.
Given the intense pressure on public finances, and local authorities paying out £65 million last year in damages caused by poor road surfaces, I'm surprised this situation has been allowed to continue.
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The roads that are worst for potholes are also the busiest. So, the road mending teams are damned if they do and damned if they don't, as they will cause traffic congestion if repairing them.
Last year, they resurfaced a busy section of road near me on night shift. Works brilliantly. But maybe its too costly to do this for potholes. They must have a list of road mending jobs that goes halfway round the world this year. Even the Tesco car park near us is riddled with deep craters, I've never seen that until now.
Edited by corax on 24/01/2010 at 13:39
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Last year they resurfaced a busy section of road near me on night shift. Works brilliantly. But maybe its too costly to do this for potholes.
IMHO the roads arent being resurfaced properly, and that causes the potholes in the 1st place.
if the existing road surface was removed, as I seem to remember happened a lot in the dim and distant past, rather than just slapping another layer of tarmac and stones on top, then we would have a decent road surface that would last a lot longer.
I have seen roads where they dont even bother filling the potholes before slapping on another layer, all that does is rounds off the edges of the pothole!
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get the council to look into them
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Yes if the potholes were correctly repaired then they would not reappear, at least not for a long time.
There is some good road repair treatments available, I did some research on this, but from what I have seem the council are using a bit of asphalt and grit mixture which doesnt last, which means having to come back and do it again.
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In fairness to utilities' contractors and road repairs, we have had virtually the whole town torn apart to lay new water pipes (United Utilities) a couple of years ago.
The contractors, at least in my area, proved not only highly efficient at pipes' replacement, but also showed a refreshing ability to reinstate the road surfaces to a very high standard.
Certainly none of their work has "come apart" during the recent month of very cold and freezing conditions, whereas the council's equivalent have to keep coming back every 12 months or so to put right what they did originally.
At least two very bad potholes, repaired less than six months ago by them, have just been repaired again after the "filling" lifted away completely.
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Could we use different surfaces than tarmac to proactively avoid the situation?
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Stu,
What do you think of the Southport to Liverpool road?
I used it over Christmas and it gets my vote as the longest stretch of potholed and poorly surfaced road in the country.
Being in a square wheeled Honda Civic didn't help, but I still wince at the thought of that journey.
We returned a different way.
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I have to say that looking at the potholes recently formed, the majority do seem to be on the edges between untilities holes and the original road surface... Perhaps they need to look at how the two surfaces are matched up in more detail?
Edited by b308 on 24/01/2010 at 15:48
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You can always try this:
www.fixmystreet.com/
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Data.gov.uk claims it is Govt sponsored opened last week and it has a Road fault reporting facility.
Data,gov.uk claims to bring uses of the net to the citizen.
The pot hole application is a joint venture with the UK Cycling community.
Both are fatally flawed - it does not cover the UK as Scottish Postcodes are not recognised.
Emailed Cycling Website that claims to be the UK Cycling asking why it excludes about 40%of the UK land mass - still waiting for an acknowledgement or a reply!!
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Data,gov.uk claims to bring uses of the net to the citizen. The pot hole application is a joint venture with the UK Cycling community. Both are fatally flawed - it does not cover the UK as Scottish Postcodes are not recognised. >>
The only app I could find there for potholes was this one:
data.gov.uk/apps/fillthathole
which leads to:
www.fillthathole.org.uk/
I cannot see where you enter the postcode on that website. I thought the google map locator was a good idea.
Edited by jbif on 24/01/2010 at 16:44
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>>What do you think of the Southport to Liverpool road?>>
Depends which one you mean? You can go either via the Formby by-pass or through Halsall and Lydiate.
Not been on either to Liverpool for about two months, so can't comment.
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...Not been on either to Liverpool for about two months, so can't comment...
Fair enough, but if anyone else would like to comment it was the A565, which takes in the Formby bypass.
I thought the stretch leaving Southport was particularly poor.
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just returned from north Wales.
Roads there were very good with no potholes at all, very odd considering the amount of snow piles still around and apparently two foot of snow they had.
Yet here in Hertfordshire the roads are in a pink fluffy dice condition.
Numerous pot holes everywhere and yet we only had six inches of snow over this cold spell.
Just shows the cheap road repairs don't stand up to much abuse from vehicles or weather.
Still, it is nice to know our council tax goes on inferior road repairs*
* Our main road repair consisted of spraying a sticky surface then piling a load of loose gravel on the surface.
Then get every car to drive down the road at a 20mph limit for two weeks before coming back to brush off the loose stones.
Edited by Dynamic Dave on 24/01/2010 at 18:01
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They don't seem to suffer from potholes in the Scottish Highlands. But I think they build the roads to a certain 'standard' in order to shrug off winter abuse. They press granite chips into the tar but leave them raised so that the water drains around them and off the sloped sides. Also they don't have the constant heavy weight of traffic. Maybe its the same in North Wales to a certain degree.
Someone from Scotland will now tell me I'm completely wrong... :-)
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The rural roads in Scotland are usually well maintained, pity the same can't be said of the urban ones. Traffic density may be part of the answer, but the rural roads don't get dug up frequently to access services and then poorly repaired.
Edited by Old Navy on 24/01/2010 at 17:17
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just returned from north Wales. Roads there were very good with no potholes at all very odd considering the amount of snow piles still around and apparently two foot of snow they had. Yet here in Hertfordshire the roads are in a pink fluffy dice condition. Numerous pot holes everywhere and yet we only had six inches of snow over this cold spell.
Much the same in South Wales as the North. If we're coming back from England and Mrs. H is driving whilst I'm getting a little shut-eye, i do not need to see the Severn Bridge to remind me I'm back in Wales; the road surface is just much smoother.
I used to live in Stevenage in the early 1990's, diddy, and the roads were awful even then.
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>>I thought the stretch leaving Southport was particularly poor.>>
Again, I would normally go via the coastal road to Woodvale first or, alternatively, as it is just as convenient, via Town Lane and Guildford Road.
However, sections of Lulworth Road have been uneven and containing pot holes for some time - certainly not the condition expected of a main route into or out of Lord Street.
But the view of many Southport residents is that Sefton Council much prefers to look after its council tax payers in the southern areas on the outskirts of Liverpool...:-(
That will probably be even more true now with so many new pot holes having been created due to around a month of hard packed snow and ice, combined with freezing temperatures.
Edited by Stuartli on 24/01/2010 at 19:45
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Hats off to Rochdale Council.
Their long time policy of being utterly useless at road repair has finally paid dividends. After the cold snap they can now report that although hundreds of new ones have appeared or worsened, the number of potholes in the Borough has increased by a mere .0001%.
Trebles all round and time to create the post of pothole outreach project liaison officer (jobshare) on £40k a year, but due to cutbacks, no car so the post will be desk based only, so he/she will have look of their window to try spot new potholes (binocular allowance)
Edited by Nsar on 24/01/2010 at 20:09
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The roads in my particular rural part of Oxfordshire were pretty poor before this winter. Now they are truly awful. Many of the roads have potholes,some are bunched together so badly, that when driving at night you have to swerve onto the wrong side of the road to prevent destroying your tyres and alloys.
I have pre iously reported potholes to the council and the Highways Agency, and have found them very efficient at reacting to my reports. However I think at preent they are overwhelmed with the shear number of holes.
At car renewal time I shall be leaning towards purchasing a large off roader, similar to many of my neighbours.
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Trebles all round and time to create the post of pothole outreach project liaison officer (jobshare) on £40k a year but due to cutbacks no car so the post will be desk based only so he/she will have look of their window to try spot new potholes (binocular allowance)
LOL. Presumably they are not offering a car because of the cost of replacement wheels / tyres when company car hits said potholes?!
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