"Domestic" road repairs/resurfacing – costs

We access the rear of our property by a private road. “Our” end of the road has seen better days and I going to try and get it repaired/resurfaced, but I’ll be trying to get the immediate neighbours to contribute as we all use it. I have no idea of what something like this will cost, anyone got any experience of this? We know who owns the road, but I suspect they won’t want to know if we approached them about repairing it as they don’t use it.

Here’s the bit of the road in question, I would guess at 40 metres long and just wide enough for a car. Quite steep in parts and pretty badly worn away. I’m guessing the cost will be somewhere between “sh*t!” and “what the actual ****!” 🙂

The red line shown below:

I’ve been told £100 per m2 but that was from someone working for the local council 🙄 Seems like £45 – £60 per m2 is about the going rate.

Just don’t do what our factory manager did when some Oirish fellas turned up and offered to tarmac our factory yard for “fifty pounds, the yard” then charged £3000. “That’s fifty pounds the yard times sixty square yards, sir!”

If it’s tarmac then it will be expensive. A similar road by me was done in crushed road scrapings and then rollered down. Cost about £300 for a 100m run and has been holding out really well even in the rain and frost.

Been there myself and was fortunate to have a father-in-law who used to be in the road building trade.

The cost can be anything from quite reasonable (for remedial work) to astronomical if you want it doing properly.

We looked into various options – including asking the council to adopt the road.

In the end I found that the council wouldn’t adopt unless we fixed it to their standard (and that also has the knock-on effect that you no longer have any rights over the land and anyone can use whatever part of it they want (ie, park on it outside your house if they wish).

Regarding fixing it – the easy way is to bung things in holes and compact it down which is very inexpensive. To do it right you could lay an entirely new surface on it however if you don’t have proper drainage installed (and have it cambered properly) you will find that it will eventually break down again (standing water gets in gaps, freezes in winter, creates cracks, making bigger holes etc).

We were quoted something like £30k for a proper job, £12k for a resurface. Unfortunately it was impossible to get full agreement of all neighbours so we went down the route of just filling in holes.

I spent two very cold December days doing it – at the princely sum of £20 per household (split between 11 households)- and one utter bitch never paid her bit, never thanked me (she even moaned she couldn’t park on her bit whilst I was actually working).

However, everyone else was really nice, fed and watered me and some even gave me beer/wine etc as extra thank yous.

In conclusion – I wouldn’t do it again and I have subsequently moved to a house on a public road but with it’s own driveway.

As luck would have it I’ve just finished a job round the corner and have a load of tarmac left over, can give you a special price now boy.

For something like this I would be looking for a proper resurfacing contractor that does Highways agency approved work as they’ll likely have a better idea of what you would want for a through traffic (albeit low volume) road. Resurfacing is fine if the sub-base and sub-grade are reasonable but you are generally best stripping and starting again if its poor to start with. I would consider talking to the LA streetworks dept and see who they use for their surfacing works as they will have to do them to HA spec.

If its owned by a 3rd party, what are the access agreements? I assume that there isn’t a clause to maintain to a certain standard? Did they previously own the land that the properties to the rear are built on and keep the road land on sale of the properties?

I would work on the principle that your average domestic driveway for 4 x 5m is between £2k and £3.5k. My money would be on it being £15-25k for a reasonable strip and surface. More if you take it back to the sub-grade and start again.

As luck would have it I’ve just finished a job round the corner and have a load of tarmac left over, can give you a special price now boy.

Were you in Racliffe in 2011?

Thanks for the replies

It’s currently not surfaced at all really – I can’t tell if it has ever been tarmacced; the top part of the road is (top being the bottom of the picture confusingly!), but then it just kind of stops where the red line begins and we’ve got nothing more than a dirt track pretty much. I think it would need properly surfacing, as it stands it is being washed/dragged away down the hill by cars/weather. The worst culprit is the chap who lives in the house where the line starts, he goes down (and even up) it in a heavy 4WD pickup every day.

About 12 years ago I had our driveway tarmaced by a proper outfit (they did roads as well). Driveway is about 40m and opens up to a 18m x 11m parking area.
They scraped the old top off (Gravel that had been compressed), laid a base coat and then a top coat which was all contoured to allow the water to drain away from the house.
Total cost was about £6.5k I think, but it was a bit of a deal. The fact that size of the area allowed them to use their big tarmac laying machines made it a much quicker and better job compared to hand laid tarmac. Cheaper too.

I’m guessing that the cost has risen quite a bit since back then though.

Concrete roadway might be much cheaper?

If you don’t own it and the owner is not likely to pay or contribute then something like this is the way forward.
” A similar road by me was done in crushed road scrapings and then rollered down. Cost about £300 for a 100m run and has been holding out really well even in the rain and frost. ”

Railtrack has recently built an access road up a hill near us to give access to some cottages in exchange for closing a level crossing. They used well-rolled crushed ballast, looks like it might be limestone or some kind of pale compact sandstone. To my surprise it has survived two winters without forming streams and gulleys and is holding out 100%, with slow encroachment of grass at the sides.

What do the house deeds say about access road?

That sounds promising, I’m just concerned it is quite steep and it runs straight out in to the main road so any material that’s washed away ends up on the highway. It’s not heavily used, but it is used every day by at least 1 car.

Looks like I need to get someone to take a look!

Not sure the deeds mention anything about the upkeep of the road, they only mention a “right of passage” across the rear of neighbouring properties and that we have a right to use the road/track (though it doesn’t say from which direction!)

I think the road was a cart track up to a farm at some point, that farm is now a house at the other end of the road (it’s this house that owns the road).

If there’s nothing about you being responsible for the upkeep of it or contributing towards it, then the owner it’s in a dangerous condition then start sending bills for damage to cars/bikes, etc. They may get the hint!

Regardless of all the above advice new shiny tarmac over that area will be a huge amount of surface run off. It needs to be managed properly.

You could speak to the Council to find out if they do private jobs? My local Council do and approx £100 per m2 is about right.

Like you, I live on an unadopted road and there is next to no chance of the neighbours contributing more than a couple of hundred quid each. And even then there will be arguments about paying that proportionally based on how much of the road they use.