What a pothole does

[daviemck2006]

It could have been LEZ. Same road, no pothole on Sunday, pothole on Monday so it was a new one.

[RichardW]

Don't be surprised if it needs a new wheel bearing in a few 00 miles as well....

[CitroJim]

Davie, at least Gabriel has steelies so if the worst happens with her a new wheel will not be such a big expense...

Plus she has a good spare...

[Stickyfinger]

I spit on your pot hole and raise you a pallet

[Hell Razor5543]

It could have been LEZ. Same road, no pothole on Sunday, pothole on Monday so it was a new one.

The problem here is that it is likely your car is the first to be damaged (and, thereby, the first time the council will have been made aware of the pothole), and this may give the council wriggle room ("We were not aware of the problem at the time" sort of thing). Good luck though, and I hope the council does manage to be fair by you.

[lexi]

Contrast this to the roads in New Zealand - nearly all roads are apexed with a slight rise along the white line and a definite slope towards the gutter on either side to prevent build up of standing water on the road surface,

Simon doesn't buy the frost theory........... nope. Meanwhile after talking like a Civil Engineer, gives a long winded and vague explanation of what is actually "road camber". It's been here since Roman times in these islands. We have cobbled streets here in UK, built before NZ was discovered!

[Mandrake]

Contrast this to the roads in New Zealand - nearly all roads are apexed with a slight rise along the white line and a definite slope towards the gutter on either side to prevent build up of standing water on the road surface,

Simon doesn't buy the frost theory........... nope. Meanwhile after talking like a Civil Engineer, gives a long winded and vague explanation of what is actually "road camber". It's been here since Roman times in these islands. We have cobbled streets here in UK, built before NZ was discovered!

Freezing only damages the road if there are joins in the surface for water to get into. Smooth uninterrupted decent quality tarmac that is not all cracked and broken or full of poorly done joins doesn't suffer from freezing expansion, and tarmac has a small amount of flexibility to expand and contract with temperature without cracks forming unlike the harder materials more often used here on older roads.

As for camber - there is precious little double camber on the roads in my area. A properly cambered road is inverted V shaped with a moderately steep slope on both sides so water will quickly run off to the nearest side. A road that leans entirely to one side doesn't count.

As an example the very road that my driveway comes out onto just leans to one side (away from my driveway) and therefore the storm water drains on my side of the road are useless and instead the drains on the other side get overwhelmed. I discovered this when I tried to run a hose out into the gutter on my side of the road for it to run along to the storm water drain at the end, only to see it run diagonally across the road instead and completely miss the drain on this side due to the incorrect camber.

Sorry Alex but maybe you should visit NZ some time before making too many excuses for the roads here, I've driven on both and the roads in Scotland are to put it bluntly "utter s**te" and are in a disgraceful state of repair in many places. I don't really care whether they date back to the Roman times or not, we live in 2017 now and we pay a lot of council tax (far more than I did in NZ) for broken and potholed roads, blocked and ineffective storm drains that constantly flood and only a bi-weekly rubbish collection...

[daviemck2006]

I went for a run to take a photo of said pothole and found a road crew there filling it in, so no photo. I then went to the roads department where They took the details, took a copy of the photo of the wheel and said we will look into it and be in touch. Meanwhile I have ordered a new uniroyal at £103, and once it arrives a local wheel restorer says the wheel with the 1/2 inch crack will fixfor £30 and that includes taking the tyre off so will fit the new tyre. So the whole thing has cost over £150, and I will have a 17" spare instead of 18". I will have to get a yellow temp use 50mph sticker for the spare to remind me if it is on.

[ekjdm14]

I need time once upset to recover before I can deal with it.

Here here...

[CitroJim]

I need time once upset to recover before I can deal with it.

Here here...

Ditto for me... It why I so hate being upset or stressed and go way out of my way to avoid it if at all possible...

[EDC5]

Wow, I never knew a pothole could completely wreck a wheel like that. It's put me off getting a set of 19" alloys that I've been considering. Hope you get something back from the council.

[Zelandeth]

Again going back to the days when I had involvement in council matters, I remember a conversation I had with one of the head maintenance guys regarding the general condition of the roads.

He reckoned (and I believe his judgement to be honest) that to get the roads in his area back into an acceptable (not good - just acceptable) condition, that he needed 10 times the available annual maintenance budget for the next 10 years at the very least simply due to the state of disrepair that they've been allowed to fall into. He was quick to add that this was probably an optimistic figure as well!

One of his biggest headaches on a daily basis was that none of the folks actually handing the money out understand the concept that it works out cheaper in the long run to *fully* renovate a worn out bit of road and then *keep* it in good repair than to keep patching up one that's already falling to bits. Sadly the folks in control of the budget are seldom looking further than the next election cycle, so getting longer term renovation projects approved is somewhere between difficult and impossible.

While I spent nearly eight years working for a council in that general area, there's no love lost for the administration as an entity itself. I can however vouch for the fact that there are a lot of people involved in it who really are trying to do a good job of looking after the infrastructure, despite a lot of factors seeming to be specifically designed to prevent that from being possible. Never had much involvement with the roads maintenance guys in Aberdeenshire, was mostly their public transport unit and road design teams I worked alongside through some Nestrans projects.

Roads around this area are ten times worse than up in Aberdeenshire for the most part I reckon Davie - though given the sheer weight of traffic on many of them that doesn't surprise me. The A422 I think it is, is absolutely shocking for one, and I'm still surprised that I've never been pulled over driving down there for driving erratically...I'm not being erratic, I'm dodging the meteor crater like potholes!

Definitely a good advert against low profile tyres and alloy wheels as well though...

[daviemck2006]

My tyres are 235/45x18. A45 aspect figure is low percentage wise, but due to the width of the tyres they do have a bit of give, and arent the rubber band things on hot hatchbacks. The 2.0hdi 407 coupes have the same design of wheels wiyh 215/55x17 tyres these would have a bit more give, and if my car had them would I have knackered the wheel and tyre, just the tyre or nothing? Will never know the answer to that! However had ir been a steelie and damaged the rim then some heat and otterchops' hammer would have sorted it!

[lexi]

The high Kerbs in NZ are to stop the sheep jumping up from the road and taking a wander into the shops.............apparently

[Deanxm]

The rules as explained to me were that to claim the pothole must be classed as unavoidable due to it's position in the road, it must be a certain width and depth and it must be unmarked, the council highlights the pothole with a bright marker to make it visable to drivers not repair crews as such, they say if you didn't see a big hole in the road with bright yellow paint all round it you are not paying attaention to driving and the incident is your own fault.

We are currently 2 years into a project to resurface every single road and footpath on the island..............potholes here are becoming a thing of the past, can't remember the last time i saw one to be honest. sorry!

D