Pothole rant

[Defender90]

Everything can be fixed, potholes, NHS, Social Care etc if you are prepared to pay for it. Double taxes , Council taxes, VAT etc. After all Governments and Councils only spend YOUR money, they don't have any of their own. Give them more of it and Everything can be sorted. NO council employee or Public service employee or Civil Servent should be paid more than the Prime Minister for doing their job.
So just vote for Councils that will double Council Tax and Parking Fees and a Government that promises to double Income Tax, VAT and NI get rid of all public employees who earn more than the PM and Utopia beckons.

This country is heading down hill fast never seen so much litter on the road sides the road conditions are on par with Greece.Not sure how it can be turned around our culture and identity is being lost.The nhs A&e times are a disgrace this is mainly due to the staff having to deal people who don’t deserve help I have witnessed these people drunk on drugs being aggressive abusive getting treatment why good people sit for 6hrs in pain.

 

[gatvol]

@Mansfieldman750

I have an up gti. It felt terribly crashy/ vulnerable over bumps in the road. I popped my first tyre sidewall outside Nortingham when the car was a week old. I had never had a sidewall go on any car before.

Transpires that the OEM Goodyear Efficient Grip tyres are absolute crap. Many owners have replaced with Pilot Sport 2 in 205 size.

I bought Goodyear Asymmetric 6 in 205 size, having checked with my insurer and they are fine with it. I bought these as they have prominent sidewalls with really good rim protection. They are much grippier.

Replacing the factory 195 tyres with 205 makes a huge difference. It feels so much more assured over rough ground/ potholes

 

[Mansfieldman750]

@Mansfieldman750

I have an up gti. It felt terribly crashy/ vulnerable over bumps in the road. I popped my first tyre sidewall outside Nortingham when the car was a week old. I had never had a sidewall go on any car before.

Transpires that the OEM Goodyear Efficient Grip tyres are absolute crap. Many owners have replaced with Pilot Sport 2 in 205 size.

I bought Goodyear Asymmetric 6 in 205 size, having checked with my insurer and they are fine with it. I bought these as they have prominent sidewalls with really good rim protection. They are much grippier.

Replacing the factory 195 tyres with 205 makes a huge difference. It feels so much more assured over rough ground/ potholes

Thanks for that. Agree the OEM Goodyears are crap. She potholed 3 of them on way to work between Mansfield and Nottingham !
She was on first name terms with the guys at Micks Tyres.

 

[BeeBee]

Fixing potholes currently seems to be throw in some tar, stomp it down and heh ho it’s fixed. First rain, up it comes. What happened to cut it out, square it off and seal it around !

 

[RockinNRollin]

It's a nightmare really. I've gone on about this before at length, but in summary previous investment combined with falling quality of raw materials has created unprecedented proportions of the network requiring maintenance simultaneously, while budgets to maintain them are low. Combine this with increased tendency for the public to try and claim for whiplash/damage on potholes, it forces highway authorities to "make safe" rather than "repair properly" (which takes longer to organise and risks more people claiming in the meantime). "Making safe" is commercially inefficient, eroding budgets even more. Vicious circle with no obvious way out short of massive funding from central government (yeah, right). Innovative solutions of rapid pothole filling are helping, but it's a drop in the ocean.

 

[kernnowkarmann]

You haven't been on the road in Belgium yet I presume...

Belgian motorways are phenomenally bad, can only presume it is because it seems to be constantly raining..... cross back into Luxembourg and you can almost see the join in the road (in fact on my bike on some of the back roads you can actually see it) and the surface goes smooth once again....

In my experience of cycling in the UK the worst counties were Somerset and Derbyshire (sorry if I've missed any out, not been everywhere!)

 

[WelshGas]

Fixing potholes currently seems to be throw in some tar, stomp it down and heh ho it’s fixed. First rain, up it comes. What happened to cut it out, square it off and seal it around !

That's what they do around here. Cut back, clean out, fill and seal the edges. Unfortunately the utility companies don't do that.

 

[Loz2286]

In High Wycombe we have potholes so famous that the tyre shops know where they all are.



Everything is worse than it was fifteen years ago.

 

[BenCar]

Government(s) need to focus on getting some people off benefits. There are plenty who are capable of working but choose not too and know how to milk the system.

Unfortunately benefit cheat costs are absolutely nothing compared to tax evasion/loop holes. Occasionally tory newspapers release a story or two about benefit cheats / migrants / cyclists to distract and make people angry about something else than the state of the nation.

 

[Mansfieldman750]

Here’s the answer to two problems in one go.
There are 12,635,000 state pensioners in UK.
I read somewhere it will take £14 billion to repair the potholes. I suspect that’s an underestimate but we’ll go along with it.
Knock a tenner a week off the state pension, they won’t miss it, that will bring in £6.57 billion a year.
Just over 2 years and the potholes are gone.
Get on with it.

 

[Van Maurice]

A pothole on the Kent side of the Dartford bridge broke our suspension. But VW sorted it under warranty. Result!

 

[Lee.Van.Cleef]

Government(s) need to focus on getting some people off benefits. There are plenty who are capable of working but choose not too and know how to milk the system.

Is there a bad link on the site? I cklicked on a thread about potholes but seem to have ended up on in the Daily Mail comments section...
But on a serious note, many of those folks on benefits of one sort or another do work, but the wages are so poor than they rely on benefits to survive. Government cuts funding to local councils to fund that support, meaning less money available to fix potoles, among other things. We can't have funded public services and low taxes.

 

[RockinNRollin]

Nail on the head really in the previous post; essentially there are more outgoings than there is income to both local and national government. Something has to give, councils are slashing services where they can, but much like the NHS and any other large public sector organisation, there are decades of disease in the management structure and operational processes which are a massive drain on funding. If resolved, it would make everything leaner and probably free up significant monies . . . but that is one hell of a task to tackle.

 

[ArunAlec]

The Government don’t have any money, it’s your money.
Round here if you report a pothole online then it’s usually marked up within 3 working days and repaired within 5 working days of the markup, or less.

Blimey that’s impressive! When using the online reporting here the system response states that if it’s considered a safety issue it will be fixed within 28 days!

 

[PeteS]

Firstly you have to report potholes to the council. Whilst the council have to maintain the roads and part of that is inspecting the roads for defects and correcting them they cannot spot every pothole. I reported a pothole a few weeks ago and it has not been repaired. I think it was done in a week. My local council South Gloucestershire have a website you can use to report road defects. There is an interactive map a drop down for the typical sizes of the pothole and you can upload photos and comments.

 

[Georgeo]

Do you think that autonomous vehicles will have special software updates to avoid potholes?

 

[Mansfieldman750]

I want the potholes sorted but as @WelshGas rightly pointed out I have to be fiscally responsible about it - the money cannot just be magicked up.
I would do away with the triple lock on the state pension. It’s nonsense.
I got a 10.1% rise last year because that’s what inflation was running at.
This year I am getting 8.5% rise because that’s what average earnings increased by this year.
If inflation was to come down to say 1.5% I would get 2.5% because that’s the third part of the triple lock.
Whichever way the dice rolls, pensioners are the winner.
So I’m a turkey voting for Xmas, scrap it.

 

[JoeSouthFrance]

This country is heading down hill fast never seen so much litter on the road sides the road conditions are on par with Greece.Not sure how it can be turned around our culture and identity is being lost.The nhs A&e times are a disgrace this is mainly due to the staff having to deal people who don’t deserve help I have witnessed these people drunk on drugs being aggressive abusive getting treatment why good people sit for 6hrs in pain.

Let’s hope it’s a nice summer

 

[Mansfieldman750]

So taxpayers have to travel to work on potholed roads to pay taxes to pay for the generous pensions of net beneficiaries of the tax system ( like me )
Then the taxpayers have to work longer, maybe until 70 or beyond, because the country cannot really afford the generous pensions in the first place.
Truly the world has gone mad.
( I did say it was a rant )

 

[PeteS]

For me WelshGas has hit the nail on the head is as much as we don’t pay enough in taxes. The last budget seemed to be a last ditch attempt to win some votes.

 

[BrendanJ]

Nail on the head really in the previous post; essentially there are more outgoings than there is income to both local and national government. Something has to give, councils are slashing services where they can, but much like the NHS and any other large public sector organisation, there are decades of disease in the management structure and operational processes which are a massive drain on funding. If resolved, it would make everything leaner and probably free up significant monies . . . but that is one hell of a task to tackle.

Might be slightly off topic, but agree totally with above comment and sentiment.
It’s about time there was a grown up debate about costs and services, instead of a constant media drivel about more money , more money and why doesn’t the government do something.
Public services have become over stretched, not under resourced, something has to give. The public bodies like the NHS ( but not the only one) have now idea about efficiency and cost allocation, just keep asking for more. And I for one would vote for the politician with the guts and intelligence to take on that debate instead of the constant blame game and politicking. Kicking the can down the road is just not sustainable and the day of reckoning is coming

 

[bullibuskombi]

Or Italy. Crossing from Switzerland into Italy and the difference is like snooker table > moon surface

I did a 2000 Mike trip around France, Switzerland and Italy last year, worst road in the entire trip was the M20.

 

[Ch1pbutty]

 

[Mansfieldman750]

Well here we are in Belgium doing pothole research for the forum. I can tell you my wife wasn’t best pleased when I said we should go through Belgium on the way back. She asked What’s in Belgium and I said Potholes, but here we are at a lovely campsite at Aywaille with a Taverne on site and everything is hunky dory.
From what I’ve seen so far Belgian potholes aren’t a patch on ours.
I’m not saying they don’t have them, they definitely do, and the change was noticeable as soon as you crossed from Germany. Malmedy is being dug up, presumably to fix the road, Francorchamps to Spa was excellent and from Spa over the hill to here started off good but then got a bit UK like.
But even if Belgium is worse than us, and it could be, we‘ve only been here an hour, we need to be working up to have roads as good as Netherlands, not working down to have roads as bad as Belgium, if we are a serious country.
Good news I’m done ranting about potholes now. Definitely.

 

[montyburns1982]

One of the best features of the Waze app is the “pothole” notification feature. Helped me avoid many a ruinous pothole.