National disgrace and not a new SUV or EV thing, it's been deteriorating with less and less maintencea for 15 years.
My view is look to france. It seems to be a source of pride. The initial building is billiard smooth whilst patch repairs a re done so well you can't tell as you drive over them. Work gets done quickly and with the minimum of disruption. Is it a nationalised workforce, so potentially expensive but value for money is the key.
My view is that it's not the lack of UK taxation nor the councils - they've been starved of money as a political strategy for decades. Tory areas don't expect the council to spend on care, homes and other social projects so there's slightly more money for making the town look pretty and roads. Labour do prioritise those things so consequently with constrained budgets spend less on road maintenance, allowing people to point the finger and claim poor maintenance and budget control.
On value for money, I would love the CMA to have a proper look at the small number of big civil firms that get build and repair jobs. The costs quoted publicly are astronomical and then the jobs take for ever (cost-justification, or in the case of maintenance just don't get done) with a skeleton or non existent workforce onsite. Just seems really poor value for tax payers money with a high proportion ending up in the pockets of Tory donors and/or offshore funds.
As with many aspects of the UK over the last 15 years (and I'm sure before) this siphoning off of tax payers money into a few pals' firms and offshore is a zero sum game for the country.
(Though it does annoy me that people complain about drains being blocked by leaves outside their houses but never seem to think they could clear it themselves if the council don’t. We shouldn’t have to, but life isn’t perfect. )
Around here it seem to be the knobbers who live in the country but don’t like leaves so use the leaf blower to blow them on to the road to make their driveways look nice.
Said leaves then wash in to the drains and block them.
Idiots.
Just drove down a road in Surrey Hills, a white water raft would have been more appropriate.
how hard is it to dig a ditch on the side of roads ffs. Address the cause
IIRC some total repair cost figures previously published were >£8Bn which exceeded the total Highways budget at the time.
Hmm.
The Department for Health & Social Care (DHSC) lost 75% of the £12 billion it spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) in the first year of the pandemic to inflated prices and kit that did not meet requirements – including fully £4 billion of PPE that will not be used in the NHS and needs to be disposed of.
(UK parliament records)
I see a lot of local lanes and roads that are the main drainage channel, the edges are being undercut and washed away and often because the field drainage areas are blocked. It wouldn't take much work to clear them, I've opened a few up with a stick on lanes I ride regularly. It's the highways authority to maintain that type of drainage but it's all underfunded and storing up problems for the future, like most things.
how hard is it to dig a ditch on the side of roads ffs. Address the cause
Not very but then as discussed it needs maintaining and cleaning.
ON the continent (admittedly where they have much more space to play with), the utilities are in conduits off to one side of the road (so the roads are not constantly being dug up and patched to fix them) and the drainage channels are all built into it.
I was in Spain in January and there was a heavy rain storm one morning. Within an hour, the roads were dry and clear - there was no chance for any debris to wash onto the roads cos all the rain had gone straight into the drains.
I worked in the highways department for many years and saw a cyclical issue with funding that was directly linked to government change. We are currently at a similar level of carriageway decay to where we were in 96/97. And we all not what happened that year.
As a result money became available for maintenance and infrastructure projects, and massively improved the network. It subsequently began to dry up again post 2010 and the arrival of austerity.
It's a political decision. Maintenance is essential and it costs money. To not maintain costs far more in the long term. We all know this yet still we see years of neglect, and it's not just the roads.
We all know that change is required to tackle so many problems but having lived through probably one of the most significant triggers ever that are likely to kickstart a modal shift in transport, I'm not holding my breath. COVID should have been the catalyst for change in our working practices. But here we all are, back in our cars. What will it take, I wonder.
At the same time we have increasingly woeful railway infrastructure that could with investment reduce significantly the use of hgv transport. This doesn't seem a contentious position to take.
Yet here we are
This morning I told madame about TiRed and his tragic post. She then told me about a friend at school whose father also died when he hit a pothole while riding a bicycle.
Plus ca change
There's roads up my end that have reached the end of their service life. They haven't been maintained for over a decade and can be viewed perhaps as a road re-wilding project, returning to their natural state. It's so bad that some of these roads should be reclassified on the maps to protect those that may be unwary from coming a cropper, or at least there should be signs up advising to venture forwards at ones own risk in admittance of their unmaintained state. With the way the UK economy is heading I don't expect the complete road rebuilding which would be necessary to return from this state of degradation to be happening any time soon. Get used to it. I own a nice road bike, barely ride it on my local routes- have encountered smoother bridleways than the roads so ride 'atb' for most of the year. Road bike is for the few weeks a year when the mud dries and for holidays to the more sophisticated European countries.
People drive because the public transportation isn’t convenient, it doesn’t go where people need to go, at the times they need to go there. Unless, of course, you live in a city. If you don’t, you’re phûcked. The villages around here are lucky if they get two buses a day, are even luckier if those buses go where they need to go, at times they need to get there. If I want to go to Bristol, which is about 25 miles away, I have to get a bus to Bath, change onto another bus to Bristol, which is a two hour journey. Ok it’s free for me, or I could catch a train, but say I wanted to go to a concert in Bristol: most finish around 11pm, then you have to get to Temple Meads, which could be a 30-40 minute walk. Or possibly even a hour, unless you understand where the buses go, or are prepared to pay out for a taxi, on top of £40-50 for the gig ticket. The last train east is 10.32pm. Tell me that’s convenient for the general public. It’s almost as bad from London, the last coach is around 10.30pm, the last train from Paddington is 11.32pm. It’s a 25 minute Tube ride from either the Roundhouse or the O2, with gigs finishing around 11 pm, and queues out and for trains of fifteen-twenty minutes. Do the math. Last time I used the train for a gig in London I managed to get onto the train home with 4 minutes to spare. If I’d missed it, it would have meant a 7 hour wait, and £100 for another ticket. And you want people forced out of their cars?
I don't think it's particularly reasonable to expect the same level of service and infrastructure in sparsely populated rural areas as you expect in towns.
That's kind of why towns exist.
You kind of have to compromise if you want to get away from the rest of us poor people who live alongside loads of other people but enjoy an associated level of convenience for our troubles.
1. Tax vehicles in proportion to the damage they cause, not by emissions. It’s a fourth power rule so at least make an effort to get it right.
2. Pay-per-mile based on routing. HGVs on motorways are not really an issue (especially if you make lane 1 concrete) but destroy minor roads. Discourage them from taking shortcuts. Same with rat-runners on quiet roads.
3. Make housing developers pick up the tab for the damage they cause. The roads are destroyed near me thanks to two new huge developments and the associated construction traffic. They haven’t repaired or resurfaced the road despite it being finished for over a year.
4. Bikes don’t cause damage and can run on softer tarmac that doesn’t crack in the winter. Put proper bike lanes in which are segregated and crush the cars that try to access them illegally.
5. When potholes are repaired, do it properly. In North Yorkshire a pothole repair consists of one man pouring a bit of tarmac into the water-filled pothole and stamping it down. Obviously it fails within weeks. The hole I tore my knee apart in at the start of February was repaired within three days of reporting it but is already back to how it was originally.
6. Actually enforce the law around agricultural equipment. The pressure on the road from the tread of a big tractor is immense, especially when the 12-year-old at the wheel guns it in a turn out of the yard / gateway. Trailers running massively overloaded with silage bales on a single axle.
7. Insist that street repairs are coordinated by utilities. If you dig up the street for routine work and don’t coordinate it with others, your company has to fully resurface a defined distance of a totally different road as a punishment. Lazy repairs get the same outcome.
I’m sure there’s more here that can go on the list.
The hole I tore my knee apart in at the start of February was repaired within three days of reporting it but is already back to how it was originally.
Sadly until the weather warms up and dries up permanent repairs won't work.
Just out of interest, anyone know the road maintenance budget in, say, Delft or Amsterdam?
Can't help thinking that among the myriad other benefits of getting people onto bikes, it must save huge amounts on road maintenance too!
Anyway, agree with BWD
Also, amusing to see how when I mentioned (in a previous thread) a relative who trashed wheels and suspension on the shitty rural local roads it was generally viewed with great scepticism. But on this thread, everyone's at it! 😅
Discourage them from taking shortcuts
Coming back to the Manchester CAZ, I’m sure in part that would’ve kept LGVs on the motorway network (where there was no charge) rather than e.g. cutting the corner on urban A roads between the M66 and M62
Does a 2 ton car on wide tyres exert the same pressure on the road as a 1 ton car on narrow tyres ?
The pressure , not the actual weight being the issue ?
Same as a ballerina on tip toe exerting more pressure than an effalump
Or does that not apply to moving vehicles ?
@doris5000 I suspect that it's more to do with getting large freight vehicles off the road and onto rail?
The pressure on the road from the tread of a big tractor is immense, especially when the 12-year-old at the wheel guns it in a turn out of the yard / gateway. Trailers running massively overloaded with silage bales on a single axle.
Isn't the point of tractor's big wheels that they spread the load out and so don't exert too much pressure on the ground?
A couple of years ago, a short(ish) stretch of A-road not far from me was resurfaced. Roughly 1.5 miles, I'd guess.
Wearing and base-courses planed out, then fresh asphalt laid, the job took maybe a week or so in total.
Now, it so happens that I work for the company that a) supplied the asphalt and b) supplied the Contracting team that actually undertook the job, so I did a bit of investigating on the QT.
Asphalt division sold approx 2500 tonnes of material to the Contracting business at about £100 per tonne - so £250K. That was the firm cost that I could track down, but it was 'internal' within the company, not the cost to the client.
On top of that, there'd have been a cost to plane out and remove the original surface, haul it away and recycle it as Recycled Asphalt Planings. Plus there'd have been the time/cost of preparing the surface once the planers had finished, fixing any damaged or worn-out ironworks, repairing drainage, plus the cost of laying the fresh courses, and then 'making good' and remarking the edges, central lines, new cats-eyes etc. Who knows what else I've missed in that summary of the work. At a guess, you could reasonably assume all that time and equipment probably cost a similar £250K as far as the ultimate client (presumably Highways England) was concerned.
Overall therefore, let's say we invoiced half a million quid to resurface 1.5 miles of road. It's no wonder potholes get patched on the cheap, or whole stretches just get surface-dressed, when the cost of doing it properly is of that sort of order. And the chances of enough funds being available to fix all the potholed roads nationally are, frankly, very slim...
Does a 2 ton car on wide tyres exert the same pressure on the road as a 1 ton car on narrow tyres ?
The pressure , not the actual weight being the issue?
I think the weight is the problem, or a combination of both. Would you rather be run over by a road bike with 80psi tyres or a Range Rover with 40psi tyres?
National disgrace and not a new SUV or EV thing, it’s been deteriorating with less and less maintencea for 15 years.
It’s political will, they have no interest,it needs to be nationalised and optimised for efficiency, they need to take national pride in it.
We’re getting a high speed train in my part of Spain, they are steaming along with it,even putting the lines underground thru the city with plans to turn the current track into parks and things.
it’ll be fast and cheap as they like Trains here and there’s the political will, enough to build 2,500 miles of high speed as opposed to your er 68 miles and on time 15 mins late and you get a 50% refund.
(sneaky edit - thinking about it most commuters on a season ticket are probably still getting it for free as that was part of the measures introduced in the cost of living crisis and energy prices ,free renewals)
I reckon you’ll need to rejoin the EU just to access the infrastructure funds to rebuild your road network 🙂
That report which states 99% of the damage is done by HGV/busses cannot possibly be correct. There are massive swathes of country roads that’re nigh impossible for those vehicles to navigate which are equally if not more degraded than all the others.
Speed needs to be accounted for. KE = 1/2MV^2 - A 20t truck doing 30mph has almost the same energy as 3.5t car doing 60mph. At motorway speeds, that car has over a 3rd of the energy, but its wheel/tyre footprint is almost 1/6 that of the HGV. Pressure = force/area. The car, at an average 25mph difference over an HGV is doing more damage, more often. Maybe an HGV is the initiator, somehow, but it’s the speed and frequency of the repeated higher loads which cause massive cumulative damage.
Large cars and vans travelling at speed are causing huge damage, they also have the ability to ignore that damage for longer and thus the roads end up in worse condition before damage is reported.
HGVs do erode road edges.
I think country roads are built to lesser specs than trunk roads.
They also degrade because of weather changes and water flow through and beneath them.
I’d heard that the majority of the damage is done by heavy vehicles too.
With cycle infrastructure the really annoying thing is that it’s cheap as chips. In Holland all they did was set specs for when roads needed to be overhauled at the end of their natural life, which I think is 30 years or so, the things that needed to be put in place for active transport.
The costs of adding them when you’re having to overhaul anyway are very low apparently, and then once they are in place maintenance is very low indeed as bikes do a tiny fraction of the damage of heavier vehicles.
That report which states 99% of the damage is done by HGV/busses cannot possibly be correct. There are massive swathes of country roads that’re nigh impossible for those vehicles to navigate which are equally if not more degraded than all the others.
Tractors, innit? Eleventy thousand tonnes on a single axle, aggressive treads, and incompetent drivers.
The reason the roads around my neck of the wood are flooded is because the tractor drivers run one side of the tractor/trailer combo along the verge. This collapses underground drains and throws huge quantities of mud into the road, which they then neatly force into any remaining drains on the road, blocking them entirely.
Rinse and repeat. I don’t know why they like driving on the verges - whether it’s to discourage cyclists from using the road due to mud, or an attempt to artificially widen it, or just because they’re distracted on their phone.
As said above, there is a war against motorists.
But if everyone used public transport, walked and cycled - there would be a massive reduction in government income from no fuel duty, no road tax - no VAT from car maintenance etc.
Don't think the government can afford for less vehicles on the road without increasing other forms of tax.
Our roads are in poor condition though!
There would also be a massive reduction in cost and increase in productivity.
Do we need to in many cases? Crap roads slow us down.
I love a provocative counterintuitive argument but a pothole recently slowed me down to stopping as I faceplanted off the bike, in front of a delivery van (the driver of which was a great guy and made sure I had a sit down before getting back on the bike).
Does a 2 ton car on wide tyres exert the same pressure on the road as a 1 ton car on narrow tyres ?
The pressure , not the actual weight being the issue?
I think the weight is the problem, or a combination of both. Would you rather be run over by a road bike with 80psi tyres or a Range Rover with 40psi tyres?
pressure exerted on the surface below the tyre is just equal to the tyre pressure (or near enough, neglect side wall stiffness).
getting your foot run over by a bike or range rover the issue is not the pressure, its that at one specific time you have either a quarter of a range rover, or half a cyclist, bearing directly on top of your foot.
the weight is the pain you feel.
now imagine being run over by a train. skinny metal wheels and very heavy. that pressure would cut your foot in half.
Forget about cars... think about haulage.
Long term plans to move more goods from road to rail are required. Logistics companies have been doing there bit there... but they don't have control of rail planning.
How about inviting the Romans back?
Their roads seem to have held up well...
But if everyone used public transport, walked and cycled – there would be a massive reduction in government income from no fuel duty, no road tax – no VAT from car maintenance etc.
Well that's a circular argument. Fewer cars means less wear and tear on the roads (as well as less congestion, less pollution etc, all of which have massive - but largely hidden - external costs). Besides, no-one is saying that cars should cease to exist or that *every* journey must be made by bike or public transport *every* time.
Fuel duty revenue is already dropping for a couple of reasons - one because at the start of Covid, Government cut fuel duty by 5p/litre to help those that still had to travel to work but couldn't because public transport had either been cut altogether or the advice was to isolate, avoid crowds and so on and also because of the shift to EV. That 5p/litre cut in duty still hasn't been reinstated (because "helping the hard-working / hard-pressed motorist..." 🙄 ) and since 2020, it's cost Government about £100bn in lost revenue.
"Road tax" - more correctly called Vehicle Excise Duty has been changed around a bit recently but cars are taxed whether they're being used or not. Even if you switch 50% of your journeys to active / public transport, if you own a car, it's sitting there taxed, it still needs its annual MOT (yes, I accept that some cars pay zero VED but then so do agricultural vehicles, emergency and military service vehicles etc).
So the main loss of revenue is solely down to the Government.
That report which states 99% of the damage is done by HGV/busses cannot possibly be correct.
Its a simplification, but broadly correct
There are massive swathes of country roads that’re nigh impossible for those vehicles to navigate which are equally if not more degraded than all the others.
It's a fourth power relationship.
A 10 ton lorry with 2 axles does 625 times the damage a 2 ton car with 2 axles does. a 12 tonner can go anywhere. A bus maxes out at 19.5 tons i think. Most service busses are around 10-12 tons empty.
Something weighing 17.5 tons with two axles (heaviest twin axle in the UK i think) does nearly 6000 times the damage of a 2 ton car (which is actually pretty weighty for a car, not an SUV though). They can get *almost* anywhere in the UK. And once the initial road surface and substructure starts to break up, all bets are off and the road will degrade much faster. Especially smaller roads with thinner/less substantial substructures, worse drainage, longer planned maintenance cycles, less inspection and so on.
Speed is a factor, but far far less important than weight.
On the other hand, a bike at 100 kilos will do about 1/160000 the damage of the 2 ton car...
In my experience the worst roads are the country roads where people have no alternative but to drive. And I don't mean 'country' in the sense of commuter towns in Surrey, I mean actual countryside with farmers and miles from cities.
However I'm not sure the increase in car weight is the problem. I mean, yes SUVs are heavier than cars, but most SUVs are just high body cars and due to the fourth-power law their damage is absolutely dwarfed by HGVs
I've done a calculation comparing to a car of weight 1400kg:
- A 2000kg SUV does about 4x the damage.
- A 25t lorry does 100,000x the damage.
- A 44t artic does almost a million times more damage.. surely that can't be right?
This takes me back to the mid to late '80's when the first mountain bikes appeared and all the walkers or anyone who didn't like the adult BMX chewing up the tracks . Look at the scars on many popular Munro's all caused by footprints walking the same path
Anyway didn't mean to detract from the thread as I hate potholes and the big 20mph bumps
surely that can’t be right?
It is, the problem is that it's not a linear relationship. A road can go for a year or so with no discernible damage no matter what traffic is using it. Then a crack appears. Vehicles thud over the crack, causing the edges of the crack to disintegrate and the crack to widen. Water gets in and the substructure of the road gets damaged, washed out etc. The crack widens, the road surface sort of falls inward and every vehicle going over it crumbles the edges a bit more and suddenly, within the space of a week, there's a massive pothole there.
The issue with understanding it is that one individual car has no discernible detrimental effect on a road so a lorry causing 1,000,000 times no discernible wear is still no discernible wear. Wear and tear is happening at a microscopic level all the time, but humans can only see it at the point it's already failed.
surely that can’t be right?
Depends on the number of axles.
a 44 tonner will have (at least) 4 axles, so the axle load is only ~11 times that of a 2 ton SUV. so ~15000 times the damage
Some of our local parishes have lengthsmen https://www.herefordshire.gov.uk/parish-councils-1/lengthsman-scheme. I know similar schemes exist elsewhere.
Meanwhile, on this frosty, damp morning our lane was temporarily closed for one of the biggest holes to be "repaired". Many less significant holes have been left untouched. If the "repair" lasts until the weekend, I'll be amazed.
How on earth would you actually go about fixing the roads?
<insert sensible suggestions>
How on earth would national/local government actually go about fixing the roads?
<insert something about previous governments/councils being at fault for it all and that they're trying their best etc etc etc meanwhile very little happens and when it does, its knackered again within 12 months>
Our roads are in poor condition though!
a 44 tonner will have (at least) 4 axles
Correct, a 44-tonner artic will, typically, have 5 or more often 6 axles.
Max 10.5 tonnes per (drive) axle, but in reality more like 7.3 tonnes per actual axle.
Edit to say for clarity - even that is quite a bit more than a 2-tonne SUV on 2 axles, of course.
Yes, there might be many more cars than HGVs on country roads, but not 15,000 times more.
I’ve just been outside and taken a photo of my road directly in front of my car, which is parked off-road.
When the local council election took place last year, I asked the LibDem representative, (the only ones who bothered to canvas for their member), what Chippenham and North Wiltshire were planning on doing about it, I was told “ they’re hoping to bring it forward to 2025…”
IMO the bigger issue with HGV's is the dual-tyres scrubbing. Our road was resurfaced (Micro Asphalt, a bit like a modern version of chip seal) and the next week I watched a delivery lorry reverse round the corner. In a single maneuver it created a pothole as the tyres pulled the new layer of tarmac off.
Same with the road my parents live down, it's about 3 miles of nothing, starting at a village in the middle of nowhere and ending at a hamlet of 3 farms and a handful of houses up the valley. One of the farms has a dairy so has a daily HGV, and each turning seems to have a similar set of potholes where the tyres must scrub.
As for fixing them, it's not that big a deal, they were no better and equally in the news towards the end of the Coalition / Cameron era, the magic money tree was shaken to fix them at election time and the problem went away for a few years.
I’ve just been outside and taken a photo of my road directly in front of my car, which is parked off-road.
There are less potholes on the dirt track i live on, despite it being a kilometer or so long, steep in places, barely maintained, badly drained and at the back end of the winter.
The work day is in a month or so, it'll have no potholes then.
There are less potholes on the dirt track i live on, despite it being a kilometer or so long, steep in places, barely maintained, badly drained and at the back end of the winter.
The problem with my road is it gets a lot of traffic, because the road it connects with, at the bottom end, while straight, and seemingly quicker, has a lot of parked cars either side, so fire engines, for example, come past me, and you can see that tires tend to run down the centre of the road and break the surface up a lot more, aided by parked vehicles narrowing the road. Plus the road it joins with just up from me is very busy, it’s got fourteen junctions along it, a couple of schools, a filling station with convenience store, and was originally the A350 from the M4 to the south-coast.
If the government enforces the ban on parking on footpaths, then the situation might improve, once the road is resurfaced. Where people will park, though is anyone’s guess, most front gardens like mine needed several tons of hardcore and gravel, Concrete or other infill, because they’re set about a foot below the footpath level so any driveway has to be raised along it’s length or sloping. I can get three vehicles on my frontage, as can several of my neighbours.
I wished we would stop building special project bike lanes etc and first fix some of the roads. I do wonder where this is all going.
First time in 10 years me and the wife did a few laps of Richmond Park on bike. The car queues were mad. Queues to get in the park and the car parks and all the way home after, static traffic, miles of it heading to KuT. Before kids we used to ride everywhere most of the time. Now since kids its harder, but I still do the same on a bike as I do in my car and tbh my car is for the fun travels camping and mtb for the family.
That ride home from the park made me think. I have always thought we need to incentivise less use, maybe a tax break, but then again if it was a tax on fuel that would do the same. Round here the traffic has gone nuts since the end of covid.
