2 hours ago
11
Esther Addley (The pothole puzzle: the bumpy ride to fixing Britain’s broken roads, 23 May) quotes Phill Wheat, a professor of transport econometrics at the University of Leeds, describing the “spiral that we could get into” if funding for road maintenance is not increased. In truth, many highway authorities are already well down that spiral.
Once holes and cracks start appearing in a road, they grow and proliferate quickly. Vehicle wheels act like jackhammers around every bump and dip. Once the surface starts breaking up and water loosens the lower layers of the road structure, the opportunity to dress or replace the surface soon passes, and rebuilding at much greater expense becomes unavoidable. So repair costs rise rapidly in the short term and multiply in the long term.
Highway authorities need to prioritise and schedule all roads for resurfacing or rebuilding. That will significantly increase the funding requirement in coming years, but once the programme is well advanced, reactive repair costs will decline sharply. Highway authorities need to model cost projections to show central government that more funding now will save money in the longer term.
There must be no cutting corners when rebuilding roads: if they continue to deform under the weight of ever-heavier vehicles, we’ll end up in a spiral again.
At least some of the extra funding could be raised by local traffic authorities from levies on road users, utilities that dig up roads, and employers that provide staff parking. Taxes rarely win votes, but if they guaranteed better roads and pavements, and lower insurance premiums, people might grudgingly accept them. When road maintenance costs do eventually start falling, surplus revenue could be invested in better bus services. Now there’s a thought.
Edward Leigh
Cambridge
With over a quarter of a million miles of paved roads in the UK but over 40m vehicles, it is easy to see how the road network might come under considerable strain. This raises the important question of a flexible maintenance strategy and the need to keep up with repairs to our roads.
A recent personal experience where the road outside of my home was dug up by the local water company to repair a broken pipe is a case in point. The pipe repair was duly completed and the road surface repaired, but the huge pothole around a gully grating not six feet away was ignored.
A few weeks later a county council lorry with an extending mechanical arm filled in this pothole with bitumen, without either of the two operatives ever leaving the vehicle, and then reversed over it to flatten the surface. I watched with fascination, but within days this had taken on a distinct concave profile. A couple of weeks after this, another council lorry, this time with four operatives, arrived on the scene, dug up the gully pothole again, but on this occasion proceeded to manually refill and compact it properly.
The moral of this tale must surely be: if you are going to do something, do it once and do it properly. Additionally, foster better interagency working by allowing road maintenance and utility crews some latitude to repair all surrounding potholes irrespective of agency responsibility. Surely some arrangement could be established for agency counter-charging, thus enabling pothole repair to become more efficient and a better use of taxpayers’ money.
Anthony Millett
Stockbridge, Hampshire
