Heatwave and Gritters

[Hell Razor5543]

It will cost a lot of money to repair and then PROPERLY maintain the roads of Great Britain, but I wonder how much money is being lost through avoidable compensation pay-outs for damage to vehicles?

[GiveMeABreak]

Consider yourself nominated, seconded and elected!

[bobins]

Sounds a bit daft but if I was ever tempted to go into local politics I would stand on a 'Pothole First' basis; I'm sure it would be a popular policy

The trouble with that is - whichever services you promise to cut in order to fund your better roads, someone will disagree and put up a counter argument against the cuts to whichever service you've chosen

[EDC5]

^ But that's the beauty of it; everyone is pissed off with the roads whereas most of the other services are not used by everyone (apart from the bins).

Plus I feel like if an independent Councillor actually won standing only for pothole fixing it would cause the other Councillors to take notice and have a bigger effect that way.

I do sometimes wonder if it is beyond the wit of man to make a substance that could fix a pothole permanently. Perhaps a resin of some sort or failing that a few liters of cyanoacrylate glue!

[bobins]

You need to be so so careful with what you decree. Touch anything with schooling or babies attached to it and you could bring down the combined armies of Mumsnet onto you, cut the spending for the elderly and you could find yourself being tripped up by wayward Zimmer frames. You're on very very dangerous ground

[GiveMeABreak]

Cracking! as Ness would say.

Mind you some of the todgers round here have stood for some ridiculous things before!

[white exec]

It will cost a lot of money to repair and then PROPERLY maintain the roads of Great Britain, but I wonder how much money is being lost through avoidable compensation pay-outs for damage to vehicles?

I seem to recall a recent BBC news item that reported that some local authorities were now paying out more in compensation than was being spent on pothole repair.

[EDC5]

Absolutely, I think I'll leave the politics to the professionals ( ). Wouldn't want to risk any revenge being sought against me or my car.

[Hell Razor5543]

It will cost a lot of money to repair and then PROPERLY maintain the roads of Great Britain, but I wonder how much money is being lost through avoidable compensation pay-outs for damage to vehicles?

I seem to recall a recent BBC news item that reported that some local authorities were now paying out more in compensation than was being spent on pothole repair.

Unfortunately I find that entirely believable.

[Michel]

I seem to recall a recent BBC news item that reported that some local authorities were now paying out more in compensation than was being spent on pothole repair.

Given that they seem to be spending sweet FA on pothole repair, that wouldn't be hard to achieve..

[Pug_XUD_KeenAmateur]

There's nothing actually wrong with the type of asphalt used or the way the councils / highways authorities maintain them - it's just that the damned motorists will insist on using the roads once they've been repaired or re-laid

omg, that is just brilliant Bobins!

I've noted on my hols that NL, D, F and B must have very different weather to ours (sic) as their roads are quite different to ours. Their road crews appear to actually be doing some work when you find a coned off section of road too,

[Pug_XUD_KeenAmateur]

NB: Bobins I once read a post on Mumsnet many years ago where a woman was complaining that her own visitors parked in her own drive, the complaint itself and the responses were equally amusing

[Michel]

There's nothing actually wrong with the type of asphalt used or the way the councils / highways authorities maintain them - it's just that the damned motorists will insist on using the roads once they've been repaired or re-laid

omg, that is just brilliant Bobins!

I've noted on my hols that NL, D, F and B must have very different weather to ours (sic) as their roads are quite different to ours. Their road crews appear to actually be doing some work when you find a coned off section of road too,

The tolls on the autoroutes in France, I presume, pay for them to be in such good condition. I'm happy to pay to use them. I can cover huge distances in a day on them, more than double what I can here in the UK!

[bobins]

The tolls on the autoroutes in France, I presume, pay for them to be in such good condition. I'm happy to pay to use them. I can cover huge distances in a day on them, more than double what I can here in the UK!

Indeed so - the autoroutes are (usually) in great condition and allow for relatively stress free driving most of the time*, but when I did a return trip down in to deepest France a year or so ago, the total cost of the run there and back on the autoroute was about the same as a years road fund licence back in the UK. If everyone in the UK was to pay £100 - £200 every time they did a long motorway run then we'd quickly find we had better roads. My suspicion is that most UK motorists wouldn't want to pay that sort of money - you only have to look at the M6 Toll and how it failed to reach commercial expectations to see what UK motorists thing of toll roads

*- except for when they don't.

[Zelandeth]

Quick snippet of a conversation I had with one of the guys in charge of road design and maintenance back when I worked at the council - technically I was part of Roads too (though that changed about every six months when they changed which department we were under).

It was a conversation with a guy who knew their stuff too, and was a great believer in the fact that doing a job properly was better than doing it cheap.

Their statement was that they'd done the math on what it would take to get things sorted out there - bearing in mind too that the roads there were *vastly* better than anywhere I've come across south of the border - and it was roughly ten times the entire annual maintenance budget for the next seven to ten years, to get it back to what he declared to be an "acceptable" standard. Not of course taking into account any of the existing maintenance work that was ongoing. The "where there's blame there's a claim" companies have had a major impact on things too as at least in our area that money came out of the same main budget as maintenance...

The fact that nobody involved in allocating funding will ever look beyond the next election cycle also means that actually trying to plan any long term projects is somewhere between impossible and well... impossible.

As for melting tarmac - yep, it's happening here too. Virtually all of the repairs they did about a month back have liquified and are once again scattering gravel everywhere.

I used to get a lot of stick back at the council for the fact that I wouldn't allow the guys to carry out tarmac laying works as part of any project I was doing if it was too hot or cold. Despite the fact that I rarely had any issues with my groundworks for some reason!