My point about roads in the alps, they actually suffer from freeze/thaw on an almost daily basis during winter months. Yet I never seem to see them in a state like we’re having to put up with. Granted they have more money than us but even so, our roads are pretty shocking.
Do they freeze thaw on a daily basis... not when I’ve been in the alps in winter - it’s below zero and stays that way all day.
they do seem to use less grit on the roads which may or may not be relevant, and are less aggressive when ploughing - presumably as vehicles tend to be fitted with winter tyres so leaving 0.5cm of hard pack is not the end of the world. They also know they will get snow every year so can design the road surface accordingly. Designing a road surface in England to alpine spec seems silly for a once in 20 years winter, provided you do some basic maintenance so that the water doesn’t get in (that means fixing the damage in Autumn and QC inspecting the utilities companies).
VED + Road Fuel Duty > 30 billion in revenue.
roads improvements < 8 billion in revenue.
i don’t object to increasing either tax but you’ll need to convince the mail/express readers, who want the government to spend more on roads and the nhs but reduce tax on hard working motorists!
The annoying thing with surface dressing is that they don't fix the underlying faults before applying it. What was a well defined pot-hole with sharp, visible edges is now a well hidden hole that is still just as damaging to vehicles as before and lethal for cyclists and bikers.
Hang on, not all the roads in the Alps are good. I’ve not done a lot of Alps riding, but the little i’ve done in and around some of the lesser known areas and ski resorts, the sorts that don’t get a lot or any tourists in the season and the surfaces have not been good at all. The routes upto the main resorts are bound to be kept upto better spec. And i’ve seen plenty of road crews out repairing roads from the previous winter season damage so let’s not make he mistake of thinking it’s some British thing that nobody else suffers from.. i’ve also driven in Canada, around Montreal, and in Norway and their roads are not perfect ribbons of tarmac impervious to the elements and daily battering they receive. And Italy received the honour of the worst roads i’ve ever driven on, and roads in Moscow were not too clever either. And after cycling around Iceland, well not all their roads are even sealed and are still dirt tracks, and they have their fair share of pot holes and crappy surfaces.
This winter (assuming it’s over) has been particularly hard on our roads and they are the worst i’ve ever known them as a motorist and a cyclist, and even with unlimited funds it would be a significant logistical challenge to go and repair all the roads in the network in a few weeks. It will take a few years to get on top of things.
Also the roads in the uk are pretty densely populated so have the dilemma of doing a ‘proper’ job of repairing vs the traffic disruption it causes. France has a similar population to the UK, but is five times the size, their roads are empty compared with ours, it’s certainly noticeable when I drive on the continent. I’ll often not see another car for hours in some of the more rural areas.
we also have the problem of foreign truck drivers blindly following sat navs that takes them on roads that are totally unsuitable for big articulated trucks on small country B roads, instead of taking the longer, less direct main road route and a 40t artic on a narrow B-road never intended to cater for such traffic soon gets torn up.
This year is particularly bad...by a long long way from my memory, but even so take your choice: tolerate a lower quality road surface requiring more frequent patch repairs or spend most of your life at temporary traffic lights as the road crews continually jump on every pothole and blemish as soon as they appear. Even a better quality road gets damaged and requires maintenance.
We should do what the Italians and Spanish did back in 2000, apply to the EU for Grants to rebuild the road network ..
Thats a rather good idea don't you think?
Oi May, I've come up with a plan... it'll save us £350m a week..
Harrogates roads are the worst I've ever driven on, they are absolutely abysmal. The locals don't care though, theyve all got Chelsea Tractors.
Do they freeze thaw on a daily basis… not when I’ve been in the alps in winter – it’s below zero and stays that way all day
Depends on the altitude, I would imagine there is a significant "zone" which is subject to regular freeze thaw
More and more money being spent on social care and welfare spending (expectations of what should be provided by the state have increased massively in the last 30 years as it has for the NHS) at a time when we're struggling to slow down the borrowing yet alone pay it back. Not surprising the infrastructure has gone to pot, we don't invest in it's maintenance any more. Can't blame the government or councils really, where would you put funding, nice new road surface or trying to avoid bad publicity about the homeless and food banks.
Couple that with the appalling mess the utility contractors make of the roads. A good start would be to make them resurface the whole carriageway, kerb to kerb, seal the edges with tar tape and make them responsible for maintenance of that section for a couple of years. Trouble is the councils would need to enforce this by employing people which they won't do for the reasons above. It ain't going to get any better with Brexit coming either.
This may have already been said, TL:DR, fundamentally, successive governments have ordered lots of road building for minimum cost, which means we do not and have not, for many decades built any quality metalled roads.
From foundations to using cheap surface dressing asphalt ( which is deemed financially worthwhile because we do not generally have to cope with the same extremes of temperature that our mountainous continental neighbours endure), expense is saved at the quotation stages to meet the brief. Clearly, those numbers are made up and the real numbers actually billed, even after using the cheapest materials.
Which is why our roads suffer from the frost/thaw process.
Combine blatant profits for the boys, with our historically very poor work ethic and it's little wonder that we have a shagged out road infrastructure, which is marginally better than our rail network.
Still, an awful lot of people made a few hundred quid with the sale of BT and our other utilities and the value of their house is just amazeballs, so can't complain...
Combination of factors.
Freeze / thaw is part of it - our winters are generally cold and wet rather than actually snowy so the temperature hovers around the zero (plus/minus a couple of degrees) for a couple of months, salt gets strewn everywhere and there's a load of water getting into cracks, joints etc, freezing, expanding, cracking, thawing, bigger hole so more water gets in there and the cycle continues.
The infrastructure is all buried under the road so there's a whole load of grids and drains, all of which create water ingress points and the whole lot can now be dug up by pretty much anyone at any time so you end up with cases where a road is beautifully resurfaced by the council and then 2 weeks later, dug up by one of several dozen utilities companies to fix something or lay more pipes & cables.
Sheer density of traffic and the increased weight of a lot of it - where it was once small family hatchbacks it's now 2-ton 4x4s.
Austerity and a general lack of care and standards. Councils are so desperate to avoid the blame culture that they'll do everything possible to show that the roads are regularly inspected without actually going to the expense of fixing them. One council got absolutely hammered on Twitter a few months ago when they posted a picture of some guy measuring a pothole and stating that as it wasn't quite as deep as the Grand Canyon, it was fine to be left for another 6 months.
On the other hand it does have the effect of slowing traffic down so it's not all bad.
Foreign lorry drivers? The absolute bastards...Bring me the head of Norbert Dentressangle...
If you voted for austerity, you are the problem.
It's your fault.
No one complained or cared when the disabled had their mobility allowance cut. No one complained when Universal Credit drove people to despair.
Now your carbon rims are being threatened and the tyres and suspension on your ego chariot are getting damaged, it's suddenly a crisis.
One occasion where money can't compensate for selfishness.
As is its a plan for the councils (probably driven by this crock of shite government) to simply not resurface the road network which will slow down vehicles, the broken ones will be fixed (or not) by the owners leaving them with even less money for essentials like food and school time childcare.
Wow, conspiracy theory right there!
...vast majority of private cars have gone from Escort-sized to hulking 4×4 in the last 20 years, plus the huge growth in white van traffic.
The increase in the number of cars in the last 30 years, and the fact that a lot of those cars are bigger and heavier must be a part of the problem. The roads are just handling more traffic which must accelerate the damage when things start crumbling. I think the cheaper short cut injection repairs that just plug the holes are not as good and you need to dig out potholes to fix them properly. That's expensive to do, though.
It's sad to see some great rural cycling roads almost being abandoned and turning into off road tracks.
As a Hereford dweller I can second pedalad with how bad the roads are here. My road rides always take the shortest route out of county (best bet is wales) .
Solution? People sized drones... but with the rule that for journeys <2miles youre resistricted to an altitude of 50meters. Let the lazy people fight it out in the sky!
Rip up the tarmac and revert it all to gravel. A quick trim with a final trim grader every so often and all's good.
AND
Buy a gravel bike. 🙂
Freeeze-thaw is the cause of the damage but the true reason is the sheer massive amount of traffic on the roads. Don't forget that 20 years ago you could happily jump in the car on a Friday afternoon and shoot off to some remote and hilly corner of Britain to do climbing or cycling. Nowadays you would be mad to contemplate doing such a thing, the burgeoning housing estates where each house has two or more cars, the massive numbers of vans bombing around delivering parcels and yes, the increasing weight of the cars themselves.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/861841/pothole-uk-recycle-plastic-bottle-bag-road
Interesting article about using plastics to fill pot holes - win/win?
I think another contributing factor is that, in relatively recent years, the weight limit for HGV's has risen from 30t to 44t. Also the number of STGO cat 2/3 carriers has risen significantly (there's a hell of a lot more really heavy machinery used in construction/agriculture/forestry than there used to be). Throw in the advances in braking, traction control and tyre technology (trucks used to spin/slip/skid more, now they just bite into the road when the driver slams on or puts the hammer down) and you've got the perfect storm.
As roads are responsibility of the council and not the government and the funding to councils has been cut over the years the only way to pay for it would be to increase council tax.
I personally would rather live with crappy roads than pay £1,000s more per year in council tax as would most other people given that choice. Any extra money should go towards bringing back services to the most in need whose last worry in the world would be whether the road surfaces are perfect....
A few years back our council was repairing potholes by using some kind of spray. It was fast and helped them hit targets but some of the repairs didn't last a week.
Any extra money should go towards bringing back services to the most in need...
And if you live in a rural area, safe, functional roads may be one of your primary needs for work, access to health care and other services. In fact safe, working roads are important for everyone.
That’s sort of my point though, it’s almost like a build it cheap build it twice approach. Which ends up costing more in the long run.
I don't think they are built on the cheap. It's lack of maintenance and poor reinstatement after road works/utility repairs that cause the problems.
Time to move to a “pay-per-mile” (with pollution multiplier) system rather than VED?
VED doesn't fund road building or repairs any more than tobacco duty funds cancer treatment. It's just another form of general taxation.
I seem to remember that our local council (Highland) used to have a large "Roads Department", and would carry out road maintenance themselves. Nowadays, I think all the work is contracted out. I've been wondering if it might be more cost effective for the council to employ a roads team to resurface roads.
I thought the roads were bad here in Norfolk, until i had to go up to Rotherham recently, dear God, they were shocking, my favourite was a road with that many holes it looked like a tarmac Somme, yet they had recently built speed humps on it, you could never have driven more than 10mph on it anyway unless you'd driven Paris-Dakar!
Problem we have in Norfolk is that many of the roads are single lane, where one car has to give way and drive into passing place or up verge to allow other past, the edges of the road and the passing places have completely worn and crumbled, my wife's VW with lower profile tyres has had 2 punctures over the winter and £480 spent on suspension components and it's 2 years old.
We have a pot-hole here so big, but on a single lane road so you cannot avoid it, that it has two tyres and a traffic cone in it, to lessen the impact.
Just laying a road at work today. Built to last 😉150 base 60 dense 40 sma. It's going no where. Literally....
...but once the water, leccy and gas people have had a go...
where its really bad, they’ve just put a sign saying ‘temporary surface’.
I've seen this in Somerset. At least our County Council have an [url= http://www.somerset.gov.uk/roads-parking-and-transport/problems-on-the-road/report-a-pothole-or-road-defect/ ]online reporting system[/url] which I make use of when I come across dangerous potholes (quite common as we're in a peaty area). I usually find that if you mention "serious injury" or "potential fatality" "to cyclist or motorcyclist" (which is perfectly true) in the description, they do get dealt with fairly quickly.
All services in the footpath, and thankfully we'e put those in too 😉
Spoke to a guy at a motorbike show a few years back who made a surface that used tarmac but with recycled car tyres and other added bits, reckoned it cost a third more than regular tarmac, but lasted twice as long, sold it to loads of Scandanavian countries, but no Council here was interested as initial outlay was greater.
It’s becuse successive governments over the years know full well they’ll be booted out at the next GE, theyby all they are interested in is short term’isms of which road repairs are lying at the bottom of a pile underneath the next sandwich delivery.
Theyre all the same, it’s endemic within politics ..
<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Stumpyjon -</span>
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Can’t blame the government or councils really, where would you put funding, nice new road surface or trying to avoid bad publicity about the homeless and food banks.
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That ignores the fact that governments have a choice about how much funding they have!
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A good start would be to make them resurface the whole carriageway, kerb to kerb, seal the edges with tar tape and make them responsible for maintenance of that section for a couple of years. Trouble is the councils would need to enforce this by employing people which they won’t do for the reasons above.
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So you can blame the councils - like you just did. When you see the cost of resurfacing a road you could easily employ quite a few "inspectors/enforcers" if it cut down on the amount of resurfacing work you had to do yourself as a council.
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It ain’t going to get any better with Brexit coming either.
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It may have escape your notice but it was government's choice to put that to a public vote, and indeed to "respect the will of the (37% of the electorate who voted out) people" so not sure you can say its not government's fault.
<div class="bbp-reply-author">deejayen
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<div class="bbp-reply-content">I seem to remember that our local council (Highland) used to have a large “Roads Department”, and would carry out road maintenance themselves. Nowadays, I think all the work is contracted out. I’ve been wondering if it might be more cost effective for the council to employ a roads team to resurface roads.
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Perhaps not: http://www.scottishconstructionnow.com/25652/finally-highland-civils-firm-offers-free-pothole-filling-service/
A lot of it is to do with tyre tread depth. We run a stupidly low tyre depth of 1.5mm which means we have to put texture into the asphalt to disperse water rather than the tyre as they do on the continent. It means that asphalt in the continent is much denser and has a larger quantity of bitchumen hense they let less water in and its water ingress that kills asphalt.
Highways England are partly at fault as they have been pushing high texture numbers and have barley budged in the last twenty years. Though that has started to change recently and they are looking more closely at scrim (friction) results rather than textures.
But it's a legacy from when SMA from Germany and Thin surface course from France was brought over to this country and they changed the recipe to give the open texture our tyres require.
If you want to have longer lasting roads then get the government to give a more sensible minimum tyre depth. Then councils and highways England can put down longer lasting materials. And over the next 15 years the problem would be greatly reduced. Without massively increasing budgets.
When designing a road cars aren't taken into account as it something along the lines of 70000 car passes does the same damage as one artic.
I could write a whole essay on the subject, but you would probably all get bored and not read it so I will leave it at this.
A lot of it is to do with tyre tread depth. We run a stupidly low tyre depth of 1.5mm which means we have to put texture into the asphalt to disperse water rather than the tyre as they do on the continent.
?? UK minimum tread depth for a car tyre is 1.6 mm. I understood it is consistent across Europe? although where Winter Tyres are required the limit may be different. Do you have a source for a claim that the non-winter tread is any different?
I could write a whole essay on the subject, but you would probably all get bored and not read it so I will leave it at this.
Well, I for one thought that was bloody interesting so there!
Sorry 1.6mm. It's winter tyres where the tread depth is different as that's when the conditions tend to be when it's wettest.
Hence the minimum U.K. Tyre depth is taken into consideration when calculating water displacement and stopping distances. In Germany they make the same calculations but use 3mm not 1.6mm.
Many potholes around here start in the high-grip surfaces that councils lay down at junctions. Are those surfaces necessary with better tyres, braking and electronic systems? The surface is ripped off gets rutted and holds water, not to mention looking worse because of the contrasting colour, and it costs more to repair
Steps are being taken to reduce unnecessary signs, and I don't see the need for the flashing electronic variety. I can't help thinking that budgets would have been healthier if unnecessary signs and surfaces hadn't been included in the design
where its really bad, they’ve just put a sign saying ‘temporary surface’.
that’s it, they aren’t even attempting to fix them.
Round us they stuck up “single track road” signs on a long stretch that up to now was two lanes, as an alternative to fixing the edges, it appeared.
They're right, though. The state it’s in now it’s pretty much one car wide!
I'm just back from a weekend of being a roadie in the alps. The roads were superb (as were the attitudes of drivers to cyclists). Saw plenty of evidence of roads being resurfaced along the TDF route.
Despite some of the higher areas still being under/just emerging from snow, they don't seem to suffer from the same gaping chasm carnage that a bit of frost in the UK causes.
They will be spending a large part of their budget repairing broken pavements as well as they are now car parks.
Here is an example of Rodney st in Liverpool city centre. Repairs are also being done with tarmac "temporarily" even though many have been in place for years.
We've all been on holiday on the mainland and seen their perfectly surfaced roads.
We all know that the reason they have such nice roads is that they are paid for by the hard working British tax payer.
Now that we don't have to pay for their roads the hard working British taxpayer will be expecting perfectly smooth roads.
Me thinks they will be disappointed.
Now that we don’t have to pay for their roads the hard working British taxpayer will be expecting perfectly smooth roads.
Me thinks they will be disappointed.
Even more so when they can't cycle on the nice European roads without paying €6 for their visa at Calais. 🙂
Report Surrey potholes here: https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/do-it-online/report-it-online
Sussex potholes here: http://love.westsussex.gov.uk/account/logon
After few recent rides on the road bike.....I've reported 20 potholes in Sussex. About half are filled, some are noted for work with no date.
Tried reporting hole in the road to Leith Hill (Surrey cc) but get std email - we've looked at that and it needs no work! So need to nag them more.
The U.K. Climate is actually really tough for the built environment as unlike our continental neighbours we don't get long sustained periods of cold and hot. We get a lot of warmish/ coldish just either sides of 0C. This means that what, say, structures in the Alps experience maybe 6x a year - freeze/ thaw - our structures (buildings, bridges, roads) experience this maybe 50 or 60x a year. Consequently the resulting effect is many times greater here because we experience more of the damage cycles.
Oh and the squeeze on public maintenance works isn't helping.
Saw plenty of evidence of roads being resurfaced along the TDF route.
Well, of course they are!
<p>Don't think "austerity" is the be all and end all of why the roads are in a state, it's exactly the same up here where the council tax was frozen for years.We can't even build new ones right! What happened to the roads built in the 70's with the huge white stone chips that lasted longer? Or did it just seem that way because more people knew how to walk the length of themselves?</p><p></p><p>It has got to a point now where I'm selling my road bike, I just can't be bothered taking a hammering in and out of work on the crappy excuse we have for a road network so I got myself a second hand Kona Dew Deluxe and haven't looked back. The roads are just far too rough, I don't honestly know how the club cyclists can be bothered as it must fairly wear you down.</p>
