Why are the roads in the UK, generally, crap, whereas the roads on the continent are, generally, excellent.

Is it the way we/they make them in the first place? Is it the local conditions (I don’t buy that, BTW)? Is it the way we/they maintain them? Is it the funding model for all of the above? Is it, as I suspect it is, all of the above?

Why are the roads in the UK, generally, crap, whereas the roads on the continent are, generally, excellent.

Constant freeze / thaw cycles due to our unpredictable climate.

Continental climate tends to be much more stable

What, even in Northern Germany, Denmark, Norway etc? I’ve driven there quite a bit, and their roads are fine.

And in Southern UK where I live, where the freeze thaw thing can’t be such a big deal, the roads are absolutely shite.

We put virtually all our utilities under the road, which makes for neater verges, but means lots of patch repairs when things need digging up.

I suspect the key thing is that we do them on the cheap. Most newly surfaced roads are just tar into which we dump a load of chippings, and let it bed in. Roads that start with beautiful smooth tarmac tend to last a bit better. Traffic volumes are high too, so lots of wear.

Have you ever been to Belgium?

Any road that isn’t a primary motorway is absolutely terrible.

And in Southern UK where I live, where the freeze thaw thing can’t be such a big deal, the roads are absolutely shite.

It  is though. In the winter where the temperature hovers around the 0 degrees mark you can have multiple freeze / thaw cycles in a single day whereas in Continental Europe it’s more likely to be either steadily warmer or colder for  more extended periods.

You don’t get the extremely changable nauture of the weather that we tend to get where it can be hail, rain, snow and sunshine in the period of an hour. It’s not about the severity, it’s about the rapid changeability that greatly increases the frequency of the freeze / thaw cyles.

Effect of the gulf stream innit.

UK is about half the size of France but only has 2.7 million fewer people, so much denser population and traffic.

https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/france/united-kingdom

And French roads were usually properly built by professional engineers employed by Napoleon for strategic reasons whereas Britain’s poxy roads evolved from packhorse trails and drove roads.

The French invented canals as well, they built the Canal du Midi as a shipping route from the Atlantic to the Med 100 years before our first canal.

The French invented canals as well,

What?

The Italians built the Naviglio Grande in the 12th Century.

And that’s before we go back to the Ancient Civilizations.

Yeah, our canals are chock full of potholes too.

I live on the welsh border. The English side has terrible roads, as soon as you cross the border into Wales the roads are great. So good roads must have something to do with number of sheep per head of population.

Most issues in the UK comes from roads not clearing standing water (which is then even more of a problem with the freeze-thaw cycle – dry roads wouldn’t have the problem!) . And the reason for that, in rural areas at least, is that drains are simply not maintained. In years gone by there used to be road-men responsible for their own patch of road and one of their main jobs was maintaining the drains to keep water off the roads. There are about 10 drains or bank cuts on the rural road within 100 metres of the end of my farm drive. They are almost always blocked with mud, leaves and twigs, or else they have been squashed flat by modern vehicles that are simply too big for these old lanes (tractors and lorries). Whenever I find a spare minute I will often go down and unblock them with a spade and a drain-rod. I do this about 5 times a year. They are always full again after a decent storm.

Have you ever been to Belgium?

Exactly what I was going to say, you glide through the Netherlands and then realise you’ve crossed into Belgium as your vision blurs and your fillings are rattled out.

You need a contour map to drive on many rural roads in France and Spain.

We put virtually all our utilities under the road, which means landowners got their way when they said “no” to allowing utilities to put drains/electricity on “their” land

FIFY

Dont forget Wales has had massive EU money pumped into it from that there Europe, a lot has gone on infrastructure (where it normally gets spent) to bring it up to EU standards.

The obvz irony in that is obvz.

Also, successive UK governments have always restricted spending on anything infrastructure wise, typical Tory policy is to PFI it and hence Toll Roads have become a thing here… The ministry for transport only concerns itself with access to-from MPs properties and Buck Palace road. They’ve also made very very bad decisions on the structure of roads and tarmac quality.. there’s a whole draft of information on the AA and RAC sites proving such.

But mostly, it’s the cyclical short-ism the UK governments have when it comes to its population and its ability to make it easy for them to move around this country.

Yep, the infrastructure round where I live appears to extend only to a guy with a spade, a bucket full of tarmac and about 20 minutes to do the whole area. On one of the roads I regularly ride on, they literally resurfaced it with about 3mm of tarmac. Didn’t even bother to fill the potholes in beforehand! One winter and it was all up again.

Presumably a lot of is as globati and bikebouy say – they just won’t/daren’t/can’t afford to shut roads to do a proper job as the rest of the network would just grind to a halt.

There is definitely a huge variation in local authorities: Cambridgeshire appear to have spent all their money on the A14 widening, the A10 north of Cambridge is a disaster and for the last year hasn’t even had any cats eyes after they were ripped out. Where I live now in Cornwall there may be only one dual carriageway but the majority of roads are actually well maintained.

Ex civil engineer here. The design and construction is fine. Maintenance is appalling, along with the rest of the UK’s infrastructure.

I’ve been lead to believe it’s the quality of ashphalt/final dressing. The uk uses the cheap stuff, generally, so it doesn’t last as long and the finished surface is more variable due to the cheaper ingredients.

That may not be true, or it may be…

A big part of the problem is the contracts with the companies appointed to operate and maintain the roads. For a lot of the problems identified early on it is not commercially advantageous to put them right before they worsen.

Have you ever been to Belgium?

Exactly what I was going to say, you glide through the Netherlands and then realise you’ve crossed into Belgium as your vision blurs and your fillings are rattled out.

lol – except in holland, where they build roads on sand, and the tarmac gets all rucked up with braking bumps at traffic lights, and then there’s a speed bump at every lights too

belgium, on the E40 between Brussels and Liege is a disaster and rattles everything on the car loose, as well as yer fillings

money….there just isn’t enough of it being spent on maintenance. most of the construction and maintenance done here will be the same as anywhere else in the western world (dependant on climatic / environmental conditions)….its just there isn’t enough money dedicated to maintaining things well. and as others have pointed out we live on in a much more densely populated country than most of Europe so our roads have greater flow of traffic and its more difficult (read costly) to close them to maintain them.

big projects (Such as the A14) tend to come out of different pots of money than funding for maintenance. and most of these big projects are maintained well afterwards as they are managed by the trunk road agencies (essentially an arm of central government – that also doesn’t have the same balancing act of spending that a council would).

lol – except in holland, where they build roads on sand, and the tarmac gets all rucked up with braking bumps at traffic lights, and then there’s a speed bump at every lights too

There’s a bus stop in Reading where the tarmac has sunk so much I actually get worried about getting stuck in the rut when cycling through it on the road bike.

Reading has abysmal roads through. Even compared to South Oxfordshire.

As others said, it’s freeze/thaw and a lack of money for maintenance, if you get a bad week in Spring with temps hovering around zero the roads just fall apart round here. Then they get patched up and fall apart again next year. That and traffic density. It’s a philosophical point but if a pothole appears in Scotland and there’s no one around to drive over it?

Dunno how much more it would cost to do things properly, I guess it’s somewhere in the margin of what’s been cut from budgets over the last 10 years.

It’s also a case of traffic management. You can’t just close a road off at will, which is what is often needed to do a proper job. Councils end up fire-fighting most of the time with patching tarmac, not ideal but a lot more holes get filled that way. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that closing roads, planing off the old tarmac and relaying with hot-roll is exponentially more expensive than dropping a bit of quick-fix in.

+1 for it being lack of maintenance, the amount of blocked up drains I see is crazy, causes standing water which gets squeezed into any crack and rhe freeze thaw plus traffic volumes does the rest, all for the sake of a road sweeper and drainage clearance once in a while. Meanwhile rural roads get edge’s pummelled by ever wider cars and 4×4 vehicles for ever “exceeding track limits”