Soldato
They have finally sorted out the road in front of pride park that had been terrible to drive along for years. I actually started going a little detour to save my suspension.
what the hell is going on with our roads.
- Thread starter bigmike20vt
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Soldato
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- 16 Aug 2009
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They've sorted out most of the potholes around here too even the moonscape at the end of the road they put down new double yellows before the junction to replace that ones that eroded away years ago but people continue to park there anyway
You wanna see our road. They redid it a couple of weeks ago, better surface than a basketball court. I was chatting to the guys doing the work and they said they took 170mm off the top and redid it, they haven't even done motorways that deep. The road wasn't even that bad, there are dozens of other roads local to us which I'd have prioritized, but nope, let's resurface one of the better ones. I can now safely say I live on one of the UK's best roads. Must have an MP living local somewhere who now has a brown envelope in his recycling bin.
Bloody noisy though, imagine opening your front door at 3am to this:
Same thing happened to my road, it's as smooth as a racetrack now. A far better job than you normally see and it didn't really need the whole thing doing.
The local MP actually does live on the street...
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Commissario
Anything that is a legitimate cause of concern due to safety seems to get a much faster response around here.
IE "lamp post damaged" they might fix in a few months "lamp post damaged, exposed wiring within reach of children" gets someone out often same day.
Same with potholes if they're in the part of the road where cyclists usually ride, or if it's big/deep enough to cause loss of control on a motorbike. or it's a pothole on a pedestrian crossing etc.
I suspect it is because once they're notified it's potentially dangerous (especially to the eyes of "an average person") the liability for the council increases massively. IIRC the councils reporting page does actually ask where in the road it is specifically so they can automatically allocate a risk factor for bikes.
The stupid thing is they might fix the pothole you've highlighted as dangerous in the report, but utterly ignore the other 5 within about a 100cm radius.
I actually end up stopping fairly frequently at times if i'm not in the car and report the worst holes etc via fix my street, I think the fastest pothole repair I've seen was pretty much next day (it was a really nasty one in a bad location), and the fastest lamppost one was within 2 hours of my ringing the council up (our toy poodle nearly piddled on the exposed bare wiring).
I'm fairly sure that certainly for "town" roads it would/should be really simple for the council to largely automate/simplify reporting of potholes, if just by doing something like fitting a "big yellow button" in the cab of the bin lorries* that triggers a snapshot from the dashcam/gps location on a phone or tablet (IIRC basically use the same system "selfie sticks" use to trigger the camera app via bluetooth), as the trucks move slowly enough over the road that getting a good location/shot would be simple (and give the crew a small bonus for doing it), or as a more advanced system have something with basic image recognition take the feed from the camera and do it automatically (as the lorries are all of a very limited number of models if the cameras were fitted in the same place calibration for size of holes would be simple).
*They do pretty much every road/street in every town and village at least every two-four weeks, and do many of them at little more than walking pace at least once in that time.
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SO many road round where I like (outside Durham, DH9 Area) that are in desperate need of repair, so much so I actively avoid using certain ones because in order to avoid the majority of the holes/bad spots to need to drive slowly and weave all over the place, it's just not worth it.
![[TW]Fox](/data/man-of-honor/2009.png){kind=avatar}
Really?
Council have come and dumped a load of stones all over the main road jsut opposite home to 'resurface' it by allowing the entire population to drive over it. so of course, all of our cars are now absolutely covered in dust and crap from the cloud created by the traffic. Brilliant. And the surface is exactly the same
And you always get some **** in an Audi thinking they are in a gravel rally, flinging them everywhere.
The main aim of surface dressing is to seal the road and stop water getting into cracks.
Soldato
The big problem where I live seems to be roads that were plonked ontop of cobbles. Ideally the entire thing needs ripping out, cobbles included and relaying properly.
Soldato
Same for us in our London house. Best road in the area which was obviously a complete coincidence to the local council leader living there.
Soldato
I will never understand why taxes are at the highest level ever, yet all services seem to have completely collapsed. Something is VERY wrong.
Man of Honour
Our village has the A95, one of the three main N/S routes in NE Scotland running through it. We have two large haulage companies based in the village plus Walkers Shortbread so we have extra heavy traffic all of the time. We have always had a problem with manhole covers collapsing in the road probably due to the "hammer effect" of HGV's going over them and making the supporting bricks collapse. Around four years ago they completely dug the whole road through the village out as the whole of the water mains and drains were getting replaced. I have never seen a road dug so deep and it caused mayhem for over a year. You would think that due to the manhole covers collapsing all the time that they would have moved the water mains/drainage pipes to the center of one side of the road so that the lorries would straddle the manholes instead of running over them but no they put them back in exactly the same place and didn't even reinforce them. Since then the road gets dug up around every six months to replace/rebuild the manhole covers. However, this has not happened for around ten months now and currently we have seven manhole covers that need repairing/replacing. Two of them in the square are on opposite sides of the road and are joining together to create a massive pothole that runs the risk of the road completely breaking up. You should hear the noise when the HGV's go over them!! A great many people including the community council has reported the problems but keep getting told that there are currently no plans to do anything about it. Meanwhile the A9 will eventually get dualled (another SNP broken promise) and the A96 frequently get's parts resurfaced while the A95 is the forgotten road and get's left to rot.
Because it's all being spent on stuff which doesn't benefit the population, like HS2 and social care/hotel rooms for migrants.
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- Joined
- 23 May 2006
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- 7,104
isnt there where a bunch of levelling up the north money went? on improving roads in and around London!. I suppose you could argue they are levelling up the North by making London more accessible
- Joined
- 23 May 2006
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because our government are a corrupt bunch of muppets who are happy to waste billions so they, their mates and donors get a few quid (sometimes a fraction of the money they waste doing it however).
case in point HS2 and VIP fast lane for PPE.....(and Brexit)
Sadly i am currently not optimistic the next lot will be radically better but I live in hope.
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Commissario
Because all the work is now outsourced to private companies who can "do it more efficiently" and move the money offshore, and we all know that patching the same pothole in 30 minutes every couple of months is so much more efficient than spending a a week replacing the surface that is 10 years past it's maximum design lift (and dealing with 100 similar potholes at the same time) for the next 5 years. I mean it only costs them £100 per pothole every 3 months which is so much better than spending £50k actually do a proper job that lasts (and saves 100k+ in the next few years).
Basically they're patching the surface and only where the holes reach a certain size, no real repairs to the subsurface and because they're leaving all the small holds they just grow.
There are potholes down one of my local roads that are basically repaired every 8-12 weeks because all they ever do is use the "pothole repair machine" that was introduced as the "fast way to fix britains roads", and IIRC amongst other failures their contractors don't seal around the repaired holes like they used to, so you always end up with a repair with a bit of a crack around it to ensure water gets in and under the patch (and that the lorries can easily kick the whole patch out after a while).
Soldato
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- 27 Mar 2013
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It can't be any worse surely
. Not wanting to turn this into speakers corner but I'm sure a couple of the parties are promising to fix the roads (sorry I couldn't even type that without laughing
).