Surface dressing may or may not be a good solution to a polished surface but the 2 times the council has done it outside my house it's been s**t.
Both times there has been no signs until halfway along the stretch which meant I rolled on to wet bitumen and filled my tyres the first time. Both times they leave all the loose chippings to pile up in the breaking areas of junctions and on the cycle paths. Mostly I'm pissed off by the fact my van's windscreen got chipped on the 3rd day I had it by the council's crap job.
Ban salad dressing?
There's a simple solution to this problem. Sell your silly roadbikes, buy a mountain bike, and don't ride on the road.
Drive your car on the freshly laid road surface at 10 miles an hour for a few days. Not 30 miles an hour, or 40, but 10. Then your precious car won't get scratched.
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it can be used as a traffic calming technique as it's noisy and drivers don't like it so they tend to slow down
Can't say I've noticed it slowing traffic down but I can vouch for the noise as Bucks CC seem to think it's ok to use it on roads that were constructed with a low-noise porous tarmac surface because of their environmentally sensitive location. But I'm sure cost-saving doesn't come in to it. 🙄 Does anyone know what the effect of using surface dressing on porous tarmac is? Does it make it non-porous?
Nothing wrong with surface dressing (that's its proper name....) at all. They make a lot better job of it these days and it's pretty much always an improvement IME.
You obviously don't live in London, where this type of bodging is never done properly, and invariably needs repairing again (and again and again..) within a very short time. Mostly, the bodgers just fill a hle in and run a roller over it. Which then gets pounded by the volume of traffic, and breaks up again. Rearely do they do a whole section of road properly, and even when they do, they'll frequently take weeks and weeks to do a relatively simple job, thus causing problems for all road users. Might as well just fix the road properly then. 🙄
The roadsin this country are generaly sht. Which, considering the revenue in VED and fuel taxes etc, makes you wonder where the money is being spent. Oh, on weapns to wage war in overseas lands with precious natural resources...
It's being spent on the NHS too. But also remember we have extremely high traffic density compared to much of Europe.
I just got back from the US. Most country roads (that would be back lanes here) were fantastic, but some of the major routes made our roads look like the Queen's own drive.
It's being spent on the NHS too.
Spending public money onvital healthcare v spending public money on weapons and war which serve a tiny elite. Sorry, not the best example ot use really. We need roads ad healthcare, we don't need war. That's 'we', all of us, not just a tiny elite. The state of road repairs reveals just how little the token efforts to appear to be doing something are actually effective. Instead of actually fixing stuff, we just paper over the cracks. Noticed how most roadworks sites seem to never have anyone working on them? Big holes with nothing happening. 'Emergency repairs' taking weeks, even months to sort out (then the actual work itself taking just a few hours). It's rubbish, yet we put up with it whilst our wonderful governments send troops and weapons to **** up yet another part of the world. Wonderful.
Came to an abrupt halt on my road bike a couple of weeks back when one of those little gray chips got jammed in the lower jockey wheel on my rear mech.
Properly stuck too, had to take the jockey out to get it out.
Any civils guys know why they would dress a 6 month old stretch of Tarmac?
We finally had a stretch of well used road linking the local quarry to the main A road fully resurfaced, unfortunately they did nothing to solve the drainage issues caused by the latest quarrying works diverting rainwater runoff away from the stream where it used to go - but that's another story...
Within 6 months the road was then closed for surface dressing and within a month there are the usual lorry width grooves running the length of the road. 🙁
Is this just a calamitous cockup by the highways maintenance guys in the office not realising that the new surface had been laid and hashing up the old knackered surface or should it prevent future wear?
Ps. The previous stretch of new Tarmac road leading to it and laid eight years ago has been left untreated...
Molgrips has it on the USA - my brother in Michigan has special wheel insurance and has had to claim three times in ten years for smashed alloys.
Any civils guys know why they would dress a 6 month old stretch of Tarmac?
Sometimes if a road is knackered they may put a thicker layer of tarmac down to strengthen the road but use aggregate that has a low PSV (skid resistance) and then use a surface dressing with a higher PSV aggregate to give it a good skid resistance.
The high PSV aggregate is expensive so only using a thin layer is more cost effective than a thicker layer of say 60mm thick
Sorry, not the best example ot use really
Example of what? All I meant was that in the UK our taxes go on healthcare as well as roads, an expense one other countries don't have. I'm not getting into a debate about military action and spending here!
surface dressing is shit, it ruins roads for weeks afterwards and theres a stretch that was done near me that within a week had 2 ruts down each lane where it had worn away back down to the original and quite good, road surface.
The road quality in the UK is piss poor and should have some time and money spent on it rather than trying to save cash at every turn but employing highly paid managers to do bugger all.
I complained about this on here a while ago. I don't have a problem with the dressing of the road if done right but here the potholes hadn't been filled in, edges not fixed or the big dips levelled. The dressing is added on top of a crap surface raising the road height so the manhole covers become like potholes themselves. Now when you drive along it you are hitting potholes that are now disguised by the dressing where you could see them before then to be bounced out of a manhole cover. I drove a van today along these roads and it was a relief not to be bounced around due to the big tyres.
The roadsin this country are generaly sht.
No, they're not, they're pretty good - at least in comparison of the rest of the world.
No, they're not, they're pretty good - at least in comparison of the rest of the world.
In comparison to most of the rest of Europe though, they're pretty shit.
We had some roads repaired and they were wonderful for a couple of weeks until the top dressing went on, I find it most annoying when it wears unevenly in the car/van/truck tyre line which is often just about the best place to cycle.
how France and Spain can produce miles of gorgeous smooth highway, resurfaced every couple of years
big fat EU subsidy.
also, had to go to zaragoza. flew into barca and drove the 2 hours or so. 100 quid in tolls.
that's how.
