Post-Winter Potholes

There is much debate at the moment about the state of Britain's Roads.

After the winter, quite a few roads have been affected by quite deep potholes. Of course it's been said that the fault is the lack of maintenence. It is in a way, but it isn't a lack of maintenance, but the wrong type of maintenance that has caused the problem.

Across the country in previous years, tarmac roads have been resurfaced using a method of spraying tar on the road surface and then a layer of chippings laid into the tar.

I've seen it up and down the country, usually afterwards there's a 20 or 20 mph speed limit until the road sweepers come through and hoover up the piles of chippings that line the road. Councils have been conned by contractors into thinking this will extend the life of the road by decades. It won't.

So there has been maintenance, but only to the surface of the road. It's cosmetic and doesn't repair the deeper fabric of the road surface.

Water is able to get into the deeper layers of tarmac and over time and a few winters frost will start to push the stones apart. Eventually you have a patch of loose stones just waiting for another frost to push them out and onto the road surface. You can see it on roads everywhere: a pothole surrounded by loose tar covered chippings. Eventually the frost recedes, the loose chippings fall back into the hole and then traffic starts to erode the edges of the pothole, adding more loose chippings to the area surrounding the hole and in the process enlarging the hole.

Eventually the surface around the hole crumbles away, producing a full-blown pothole.

So, the cosmetic resurfacing over the past few decades has come home to roost with a patchwork of deeper potholes in roads this Spring.

Filling the potholes with tarmac is only a temporary mesure because the fabric of the road surrounding the hole is weakened and eventually the patch is expelled as the area around it loosens.

The only way to fix it permanently is to dig the road up and start again. Very costly and probably more costly than doing proper meaintenance in the first place rather than the cosmetic tart-up job that's been going on. Not quick and not cheap. But done by the same people that promoted the cosmetic resurfacing as a permanent solution. Win-Win for them.

Maybe we'll be good in time for next winter....