I happened to drive the Calderdale Valley for the first time last weekend, Rochdale to Halifax direction. Would have the potential to be a lovely route but I dare not look at the scenary – chuffing hell the road surface was truely appalling!

One section half way between Hebden to Halifax where there’s just an unmarked 2ft drop in the road!! I was only doing 30mph it was just getting dark so didn’t see it propetly, hit it and thought I’d written off the front suspension! Absolutely shocking state of condition.

the number of claims put in to councils due to pot holes had shot up, yet the money paid out on claims had dropped, as councils just don’t have the money anymore.

Payouts don’t come from councils, it comes from insurance.

Councils (well, their insurance companies) are very good at fighting claims.

i am not sure all they payouts come from insurance. I would imagine like most policies there would be an hefty excess, so the big claims in the £000s are covered but all the smaller ones of a few hundred pounds may be out of their funds? I would imagine lots of claims for tyres/wheels  would be in the hundreds and paid directly while injury claims would be larger and paid via insurance? I may be wrong on this though, it was just what was said in the article. The article didn’t say they claims were being fought/rejected, more implied that they were just not being paid in lots of cases due to lack of money

edit. FFS, bloody quote function!

I think there’s a pattern with gov and council spending when they are happy to pay out capital expenditure but not ongoing maintenance.

It seems to happen all the time with everything from playgrounds to hospitals. Stuff runs down and then gets rebuilt.

Maybe it’s better politically to be seen to be building something “new”

I live in a very rural area, in a village with no main roads in our out, and a lot of farm traffic. The roads are F’d.

Edges collapsed, ditches and drains collapsed and not functioning, roads flooded and being washed away half of the year, and the local A roads aren’t much better. I drive a 4×4 for a variety of reasons, but it’s a definite plus with the state of the roads (even if I’m contributing to damage more than others). I hit a pot hole so hard the other week that it actually jarred my back. Fortunately the truck took it in it’s stride – I think in a small car you’d have been looking at a new wheel and tyre as a minimum.

I worked in Local Authority for over a decade so I’m well aware of financing issues and don’t blame them – they can’t do it all and I do believe people are doing their best with what the resources they do have. The problem is just so big now that all they can do is fight fires, and that’s probably swallowing all of their budgets.

Cars are ALL getting too heavy though, they all seem to be getting bigger (but actually smaller inside crazily) regardless of the methof of propulsion, you don’t see many cars that aren’t SUV shaped now, and I think electric cars have gone in totally the wrong direction – they should be aimed at the £15-20k second/city car market, not 2.5 tonne 400 mile range 500bhp twatmobiles.

I can’t see a solution, we all just have to get used to shit roads.

We picked my wife’s car up from the garage yesterday after failing its MOT with a broken front spring. The tester was saying how he’s had more cars with broken springs lately than he can ever remember, there was actually another guy in at the same time picking up his car from MOT that had the same issue!

The roads around us are dire. The council’s attempts to repair them are laughably pointless. I’m not an expert in these things but it can’t be helped by the fact that probably 75% of drains around here are blocked solid which is causing flooded roads which I’d imagine helps to increase the damage to the surfaces.
I never take a bike near some of the roads at the surfaces are so bad that they’re dangerous to ride.
I’ve no idea how you go about fixing it but I don’t envy the person who has to sort the mess out.

BWD states it well

the modal shift in transport cannot be done overnight and no one expects it to be so.  So folk have time to adapt and money raised from making cars and trucks pay their way can be put into public transport. Understanding this negates 90% of the objhections

From the repairs i see locally the edge of the pothole repair is just left as tarmac (no tar to seal the gap). I remember years ago watching a tv programmes about the overuse of tar on the edge of the pothole repair causing a number of motorcycle accidents.

I wonder if this is the reason they dont appear to seal the edges of the pot hole repair, and hence they dont seem to last?

Also when was the last time you saw the council clearing drainage ditches at the side of roads (again council cutbacks)

I wonder if there is a correlation between tyre sidewall size and the increase in damage sustained ? Perhaps an option to spec smaller wheels when buying the car?

Heavy suvs running (say an audi q7) running on low profile tyres seems mad.

Let’s play devils advocate. Do we need to in many cases? Crap roads slow us down. Thus a good thing except for blue light users which tend to have or could have more substantial vehicles.  Travel times are easily solved. Get out of bed earlier. Looking at the view? Stop and look. Drive according to conditions. Sadly people don’t seem to think that that applies.

Get every possible load onto the railways as ultimately we need to get everything possible off the roads.

There is no money for maintenance, thats the problem, 75% of council money goes on social care. Social care costs are growing exponentially due to a number of factors, central government mandating care responsibilities onto councils, better medical care meaning people live longer but necessarily independantly and then theres the real elephant in the room people not looking after themselves and much higher expectations on the state to support them when it all goes wromg. We either need to fund everything to a much higher level (which i dont think is politically realistic of financially practical).

Road repairs need to be funded and ring fenced but we dont do that with any infrastructure. Ironically the dirt fireroads in my local forest get better maintenance and have less pot holes than the surrounding roads.

it can’t be helped by the fact that probably 75% of drains around here are blocked solid which is causing flooded roads

Derby City Council have just revised their non-existent budget to get a second gully cleaner. They currently only have one to try and keep on top of 43,000 drains.

They cost £180k as well.

(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. )

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…