I was just wondering what the state of your roads were like! Driving on the roads in the south east of England is like negotiating something that Neil Armstrong would have been familiar with on the lunar surface, indeed I'm pretty sure NASA test their little planet exploration buggie things down our street! I am at a loss as to why the council cannot fill them in, the only explanation I have is they are being nurtuted into some form of inverted speed bumps. I know that everyone here wants to spend gazzlions on the NHS and building useless aircraft carriers with no planes and nuclear submarines that don't work, indeed we spend quite a lot on road safety awareness campaigns. However, shortly we're going to have some of the safest roads in the world because no bugger can drive on the bloody things!! I pay my road tax.... fix the friggin potholes!!!!
Here the news said 27,000 and counting. Worse this year because we had a number of days that change from extremely cold to warm. Driving my truck I call the billy goat because it takes them in stride.
Freeze/thaw cycles murder the best of roads. The more there are, the better sealed the roads need to be to keep water from infiltrating the surface and expanding when it freezes to make new potholes. The area I live in is one of the worst for this. In a good year, there are too many cycles. In a bad year, we are all screwed. The best offense is a good defense. Good tires with the right air pressure, good shocks and springs and responsive steering are a great start. After those, it's all about taking a little more time, learning to recognize possible pothole areas on roads you commonly drive, having a service that will tow your car available, and simply relaxing and enjoying the ride/drive. Then, if you have a pothole reporting service for your area, use it often. It's a never-ending battle when you drive. Or, ride public transportation and put your earbuds in your ears.
I emailed a complaint to the local authority about the gigantic potholes in my road, and it's a quite busy road too. The response was as follows: 'Dear Mr Cerberus, thank you for bringing this problem to our attention, and could you please tell us exactly where they are.' Sorry to repeat myself, but this is the sort of thing you get when a country becomes well and truly bureaucratised. Actually I've just remembered that at the time I was tempted to ask if, in order to save me going to the trouble of measuring the road to ascertain where they are, and then emailing again to inform them, 'perhaps you'd like me to fill them for you?'
That's funny right there. I l'd mao. Where I live, there are small road signs that are called mile markers, every tenth of a mile or so. They have either one number or two with a line between. The two numbers tell the mile you are at and the total miles of the road. If you give them two signs and tell them the potholes are between the two, they will know where to look. It is true that all of government is wasteful and has way more money than they need to run properly. It is also true they have quite a fair amount of redundancy. I've posted before that the government needs to change from top to bottom. It may help to start at the local level.
Oklahoma is known for its bad roads. We know when we've crossed the border to another state by how smooth and maintained the roads become. We had a nice road trip starting with Oklahoma (bumpity bump, bump....) And then smooth traveling through Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Texas and back to bumpity bump bump Oklahoma. Some sort of corruption happening in my opinion.
I could be completely wrong here but I'm wondering whether all these potholes could be indicative of the state of the UK economy, with many towns having made budget cuts. You can only divert money away from infrastructure for so long before the effects begin showing. Sweden in the 90s the roads were always in excellent pristine condition, despite vast distances and a much more sparse population when compared to England.
To be honest, sure, we have potholes (who doesn't/bound to happen)... but in my experience; America/I-95 has a huge pothole problem... Nothing I've seen in London compares. Also, in the UK, we don't have war veterans standing on the side of the road with signs like 'will work for food'... Can't say that about America. So before you complain about potholes in Britain, just remember 'it could be worse.'
So hang on lol, let me see if I've got this straight... You're remarking on a local council's wasteful spending resulting in no money to fix the potholes on the motorway or whatever road, and want the council to start erecting 'pothole zone' signs - rather than just spending the money on tar and rubble to fix the potholes? IDK, is this some sort of panel show I've unwittingly stumbled upon here?
lol No, I didn't realize the UK didn't have those signs. Some roads here don't have them, but they are in rural areas. Most of the state or federal roads have them. I don't expect them to spend money on anything that isn't a social issue that somehow discriminates some small segment of the population or highly zealous religious immigrants. Well, even that isn't accurate. They probably spend the money on trampling the rights of the citizens. lol sorry for being so ironic.
It's called 'a period of austerity', and we've been suffering it for over a decade, having been brainwashed that it was to pay off our ginormous national debt - which is more now than it was all those years ago. Our politicians couldn't run a piss-up in a brewery: their latest wheeze it to spin the news that 'there's an overwhelming public willingness to pay more taxes to fund the NHS, which will be 'ring-fenced' (ie the sum collected will be used only for the NHS and nothing else), and if anyone believes that they'll believe anything. The NHS doesn't need more funding, all it really needs is fewer bureaucrats, and to stop being abused 24/7.
Here in the UK its the local authority that is responsible for the normal (non-motorway) roads. The idea being they will tender the work to a "reputable" road contractor to maintain the roads....this builder then takes his cut and sub-contracts the work to another firm who then subcontract ...etc etc ad nauseaum...until eventually you get two latvian herberts with a bucket of road tar and a shovel....everyone takes a slice of the pie until the two herberts decide to pitch up and fix the hole which promptly fails after a five year rolls her bike over it. And the whole fiasco starts again....yeah we have "corruption" as well but its not called that here....hmmm
Couldn't've put it better meself! They did eventually come to my road - they splodged (as you say, TS) a shovel-full or two of tarmac into the worst ones, tamped it down a bit with er, with a tamper, and . . . yes, you've guessed it - it has started to crumble away again already.
Just be thankful there isn't any wars going on to keep resources limited. I'm sure if anybody wanted to hold money from the public, they'd use a war to justify the shortages.
