So, lossa potholes. Yep, they used a cheaper road surface. Which could have been fine if only they maintained it properly. Guess what?
Department for Transport figures show that in the early 1990s, preservation work was carried out on about 7 per cent of the UK’s roads each year. By 2024, this had fallen to less than 3 per cent for A roads, and 2 per cent for minor roads.
The decline has accelerated in recent years. “We were doing about 90 million square metres of surface dressing in 2008,” says Hansford. “By 2023 we were down to 35 million square metres. It’s because budgets have been squeezed. Highways are up against things like rising costs in adult and children’s social care, and they often lose that battle.”
Governments are shite at maintenance.
Sadly, most drivers (like me) who hate potholes, also hate road closures, so it’s a lose-lose situation.
Surface dressing has the advantage of being comparatively cheap to the highway provider, but it is shite at dealing with potholes, if only because it doesn’t actually fill the hole. The costs also exclude the costs of damage to cars – chipped windscreens and paint, rust etc – and thus the entire societal cost isn’t computed.
We hate road closures because they are:
Done at a time of maximum inconvenience and
Kept up longer than necessary with no one visibly working on them!
“We hate road closures because they are:
Done at a time of maximum inconvenience”
Only if its the State doing the work.
Last year wanted to have some traffic lights on an A road that adjoins my farm, so I could deal with some trees in the hedge next to the road. All at my expense of course, and only from 10am to 3pm to avoid rush hour traffic. Oh no, said Mr Highways Dept, you can’t have a traffic light permit during the day, that would inconvenience road users, its got to be done at night. But thats going to cost an absolute fortune I replied. Tough they said, if it can be done at night it must be, end of. So I parked the idea as it would have cost me north of £10k to have traffic lights set up at night and a tree surgeon’s gang working in the dark.
Forward to earlier this month. The entire road was closed all day on a Friday and Saturday for resurfacing work. And again just yesterday for more of the same. No night working for Mr Highways Dept, he just closes the road and f*ck the road users.
I had the last laugh though because once I realised the road was closed I was out there with my machinery on an empty road doing all the work I would have had to pay a fortune for if it had been done officially. I didn’t stop grinning for a week.
Well done, Jim. Sometimes things go right, even on the farm…
I’m reminded of a (classic) Top Gear episode where they showed a picture of a road sign saying something like “lane closed to smooth traffic”.
No, it was to slow traffic down even more.
I have to say, they do a brilliant job here…
When they resurface the motorway they put in a contra-flow at about 7pm, put up floodlights, strip, re-surface and re-mark the road and open it again for the morning rush.
They can do five miles or so per night with almost no traffic disruption.
An anti-car government, looking for disincentives for driving, isn’t going to be eager to maintain roads. They forget the truck, delivery van, bus and emergency services problems, but then, green good intentions, eh?
But again, maintenance. Architects don’t help. I remember looking at the then-new Jubilee line stations, particularly Westminster, and thinking: “Those exposed pipes and angular corners are hard to reach. They’ll be covered in dirt and pigeon shit in five years because there’ll be no cleaning done.” Perhaps I’m the Oracle of Delphi.
Look at what wins the Stirling Prize. It’s government buildings. Which isn’t really an architecture prize, as in a building that balances efficiency, cost, and pleasure. It’s just about it being cool looking.
Architects love doing cool funky shit, but they know it’s going to bounce off a private business. A John Lloyd leisure centre just wants a really boring cube. Come into them with your cool funky shit and they’ll tell you to fuck off. Government on the other hand will think about “a modern statement about London” or eco” or some such shit and build a fucking expensive Olympic Aquatic Centre.
It’s something that particularly sticks with railways. Government treat them like they should be pleasuredomes, when they’re just places to get on a train. They can be boring as shit. Theale station is just a big car park, a few portakabins for tickets, toilets and a bloke that sells coffee from a trailer, and on the platform are bus shelters. Does the job.
Some train stations are beautiful. But they were all designed before the modernists came into fashion.
Yes, if there’s a modernist or post-modernist architect then put in a cube. It’s about the level of what they might be competent at. Though the execution will still be awful.
Who gives a shit about beauty when catching a train? When I go to Bath to get my luxury wines, I will be sat in a cafe, open my phone and check the train times and finish my coffee and leave about 15 minutes before. 10 minutes walk, and about making sure I’m there 5 minutes before. It’s not a place I either need or want to spend much time in. It is something that has to be nothing but functional and spending money to make it pretty is a waste of money.
Stations probably had to be nice when railways first came along to attract people away from horses and carts, as it was a new thing. But you know what trains are, what they do.
Also, people really need to get over the road thing. It won, overwhelmingly. Sure, not in large cities and maybe not connecting large cities, but road traffic is something like 96% of all journeys. About 90% by car and about 6% by bus.
These people played the SimCity games and think they’re city planners as a result.
One notable thing about them was that railroads were strictly superior in terms of carrying traffic to roads, and there were no downsides.
So after a little while you had a city where there were only railroads.
People made jokes about things like “the garbage collection train”.
Yeah, that’s a terrible mistake. The big difference between road and rail is competition. For close to 100 years, cars, trucks coaches have been made by competing companies and often driven by competing companies. That’s led to lots of minor improvements over time.
Cars went from a rich man’s luxury to being better than trains in about 50 years. And over the next 50 years they improved still further, while trains remained as shit. Honda, Toyota, VW ate British Leyland’s lunch.
Same with coaches. National Express took a profit hit this year because Flixbus arrived. There’s 3 big coach companies all competing for the customer, all having to do better. All doing those marginal little changes and lots of them.
As others have pointed out, small changes to bus routes are quick and easy to do. Changes to rail routes take years (and usually £billions). Not just HS2, look at E-W rail.
100%. Rail is a brittle technology. It doesn’t mean don’t build trains but that you need to be very serious in the planning and have a large margin of error with it.
I’m pretty sure that a Heathrow to the Western Line would add up. It’s about £1bn. Gives rail from Reading to Heathrow. And Reading serves as a hub to the South West, South Wales, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Oxford. And you could charge loads to use it because the alternative it parking at the airport, which will cost you about £30/day. National Express charge a decent whack if you go to Heathrow for this reason.
Isnt Flixbus where they had that huge fire and explosion at a chemical plant in 1974 ?
Well remembered!
“Governments are shite at maintenance.”
With this mob of evil, stupid, ignorant fraudsters, “maintenance” is the word you should have left out, Tim…
Northampton Bus Station and the Grovesnor Centre next door were this situation encapsulated. Built around the same time. One by the council one by Grovesnor Estates. The latter used a lot more hard wearing surfaces. Yes, expensive floor tiles cost a lot more, but they last longer, and the big cost is blokes replacing them, not the tile.
Not a lot of people know this, but I think the peak of privatisation was the Swindon to Cirencester dual carriageway, the A419. It is a private road, a toll road. There’s no booths on it on it, and you, the driver don’t see any money change hands, but it is owned by a private contractor, and they are paid by the government per vehicle.
Which of course means that they have to balance cost of maintenance and income from traffic. Maybe it’s worth getting maintenance done quickly, over a weekend or through the night, so you don’t disrupt the business of carrying traffic. Or, maybe you think about doing work properly so it lasts longer.
Part of the reason they’re shite is annually allocated budgets and no-one knows what they’re going to get. Grosvenor Estates thought of the Grovesnor Centre as a 20+ year thing. Worth spending a bit more in year 1 to make a big saving in year 7.
The Thermae Bath Spa was also like this, BTW. Council went for some cheaper paint instead of top end stuff that suits high humidity. They employed contractors to do it, when really, the sensible thing was to license it to an operator.
I was in Tokyo in 1988. Went out for a gig one early afternoon and the dual carriageway outside was its normal busy self. Came back a bit after midnight and one side had been dug up to a depth of a foot for a full hundred yards. The site was floodlit and swarming with workers. By breakfast the road was fully restored and back to its normal busy self. That night they did the next hundred yards.
The Brits in my band were speechless, as I was. Never thought such a thing was possible. It was like witnessing a miracle.
Things have changed. I was in Tokyo in 2018, and again in 2024. Near where I was staying there’s an incomplete 0.7km urban relief road with signs at each end explaining it’s been “in progress” since 2007. [url=href=”https://pics.mdfs.net/2024/12/2412154.htm]link[/url]
A think tank I might be associated with spotted that sort of thing and wondered why? The maintenace company is charged a lane rental for the road for the time it is out of use. A fierce one. Of course, that has to be added to the price of the repair contract. But if they finish early they get to keep part of the rental. If late they lose a fortune.
We then got that encoded into British road contracts.
Yes, yes, I know, it’s not quite as good here. But it’s a damn sight better than it used to be.
Well it isn’t working.
Saturday 3 weeks ago heading back from Scotland and on the M40 heading for the A34 when we were informed there were delays on the A34 because of road works. It added 1.5 hours to our journey and as we were crawling down lane 1 with lane 2 coned off there was no sign of any work.
After while Mrs Bloke in North Dorset commented that she would be most annoyed if there weren’t actually any road works. Needless to say we got to the end of the roadworks and no sign of any work or workers..
Perhaps stringing up CEOs, including the ones who manage councils, would be a better incentive.
I wonder if the company doing the work got that road rental forgiven as part of the contract.
Yes I know it’s in the code. But the code has to be enforced to be any good.
I’ve worked for government for a while, and the standard T&Cs in RFPs can have…differing…levels of inclusion and enforcement depending on whether someone important is pushing them.
M40 to A34 to Oxford has been poisonous for years. J9 on the M40 is the worst mway junction there is.
My wife has to go up to Northamptonshire quite often and at peak times turns off at Weston-on-the-Green and takes the country road to Ardley and then gets onto the A34 near J10.
M40 saves time when it’s quiet but the rest of the time, the other route is a similar time or quicker.
That said, I have a feeling that Bloke In North Dorset’s roadworks are the ones further south. The alternative route there is A420 to Swindon, M4 to Chippenham and drop down the A350. Although I would go Leamington to Cirencester on the Fosse Way, down to Chippenham etc. Not really any quicker than sitting in traffic but I like the certainty of country roads.
The 419 is a pleasure to drive down.
A\art from all the coppers hiding in the lay bys.
Now they have knocked down the Air Balloon, will that corner become navigable without massive queues ?
“Now they have knocked down the Air Balloon, will that corner become navigable without massive queues ?”
Yes, but not until 2027 when the whole thing is finished, hopefully.
The term for the arrangement with the A219 is “shadow toll” – see Wikipedia page. I get the impression that the biggest benefit of shadow tolling a road is that maintenance is guaranteed as the tolls provide a revenue stream to pay for it. And the biggest fault, ass seen by governments, is that the tolls have to keep being paid, so they cannot squander the taxpayers’ money on the latest crazy policy but are forced to pay for boring, necessary maintenance.
That’s exactly it. It’s a completely managed service, where gov just pays for each car that goes on it. It’s like me going on National Express and handing them quids to carry me. How they do it, I don’t give a crap.
Things like HS2 should not be done by government but just government decides some sort of subsidy structure and asks the private sector to build it. If the private sector says “fuck no” then it isn’t worth building.
Responsibility for most roads is delegated, so (for example) county councils can delegate highway maintenance to lower tiers of local government. Curiously, when local government budgets are cut or capped, the first thing to be cut is highways maintenance – and never, ever, the ‘directors’ on six-figure salaries (+ gold-plated pensions).
See:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome#:~:text=The%20Washington%20Monument%20syndrome%2C%20also,when%20faced%20with%20budget%20cuts.
The Highways are better maintained than the pavements [“sidewalks” to the Septics].
Of course in Oz, we call them by their proper name, ‘footpaths’.
Village I used to live in had a particularly bad road surface at a major junction, serious disintegration of the substructure. Highways decided to repair with a surface dressing, within two weeks it had disintegrated. Local councillor wrote to Highways to complain, instead of just saying ‘yep, we used an unsuitable repair’ the officer came up with some fairytale about drivers going too fast whilst the temporary surface was exposed during the works. Utter drivel; there were lights, cones and partial closures during the works, and more importantly the junction is actually were the traffic flows slowest because of vehicles entering and exiting the major road. The bit were traffic can be fast was fine, because the substructure wasn’t flawed.