Fixing potholes

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I could never understand why it costs many millions to repair the reported potholes (6312) of Surrey for example. Or indeed billions nationally. I have repaired potholes at the end of my driveway where it joins the main road. You buy a bag of tarmac, you dig out the loose stones and dirt from the hole till it’s nice and clean and solid, throw in the tarmac and voila!, it’s good for 4 to 5 years for 3 quid plus my time (1 hour) .

That doesn’t cost millions does it? I was watching a news program on TV showing councils repairing potholes. They had a road gang with 3 to 5 massive machines, stripped the entire road surface for a hundred yards and replaced the entire road. Quoted cost? 200k.

Ah! I then saw why this is a billion pound problem. Replace 100% of the surface for a 1% problem or else the potholes might come back. This has the benefit of using up any spare council slush money swilling about before the end of the budget cycle. Have you noticed the increase in road repair activity in February and March. So the sad state of the roads is a political Aunt Sally to maintain council budgets, and ‘relationships’ with the construction industry.

Pothole repair is rubbished by these experts as it doesn’t last as long as proper resurfacing. But if your planned resurfacing is way longer than the lifetime of our pothole repair then you are full of shit.

The good thing about potholes though, is that lots of cyclists in Lycra get their bollocks crushed every year.

Nominated by Mrs B, Essex

22 thoughts on “Fixing potholes”

  1. Aah, Mrs B, Essex…I have a stack of old Viz’s (when it was proper funny) next to the bog. She’d endorse anything, Mrs B!

    • There is a letter in the current issue that claims to wank with the picture of Mrs B, Essex. Coincidence? I think not.

  2. Those potholes that have been repaired locally to us have not been repaired to a reasonable level, also fair to say the vast level have yet to be repaired and are causing motorists major problems.

    Only yesterday I was required to spend £135 on a new low profile tyre where the damage caused was indirectly from a large fucking pothole in an unlit road. The pothole has now been reported but several days later still remains unrepaired.

    I suspect like most things that the pothole repairs are a false economy and another huge racket, where the local council are charged large amounts of money by contractors for a quick fix second rate job, and then again when the initial repair fails.

  3. generaly the state of the roads in surrey is shite unless the road is used for events using non inspected non taxed vehicles (bicycles).
    I noticed that local councils employed different hazard marking sprays, over the Guildford side they used a rather striking hi viz red paint to mark the offending orifice, where as waverly council chose to use a rather eye catching green paint, using the “traffic light system” I assumed red meant nasty and green meant “not to bad” I hit one of those nice friendly green marked waverly pot holes and it almost ripped the wheel off the van!
    bastards.

  5. Roads in UK are shite. Either they are unpassable because of potholes, are blocked with trafic jams, speed restricted becuase of road works which no cunt ever seems to be actually working on or are infested with speed cameras. I did a bit of driving when I was in Thailand last years, Pattaya to Chiang Mai and then the Hong Son loop and back to Pattaya again. 7 solid days of driving. The roads were pretty good, reasonable surfaces, almost empty and no fucking speed cameras. Driving around Bangkok was a bit of a cunt but all in all the roads were far better than UK. Its a bad job when Thai roads are better than UK’s.

  6. If they used asphalt instead of tarmac when surfacing the road in the first place the surface would last a lot longer and not come to pieces after a bit of icy weather. But, of course asphalt costs more money than tarmac so it’s the usual British “trick” of cheap now, expensive in the long run. Also I don’t doubt the drip feed of running repairs to contractors, a few backhanders going on there i imagine.

  10. How many men to repair a pot hole? A driver for the industrial size pot hole fixer who only drives. Am man to measure the hole who only measures. A man to mix the stuff who only mixes. A man to fill the hole who only fills. A supervisor who does fuck all. Bingo. Five union members have happy days.

  11. One of the farmers near me is paid by the council to clear the snow if it gets too much for them to cope by themselves. I noticed that he’s done a sterling job recently,he must have had the bucket too low on the Manitou as he’s been bucketing it off the road. He’s scraped all the Cats-eyes out of the middle of the road. A few new potholes to avoid..lovely stuff.

  12. Apparently there are millions of potholes in the U.K.
    Millions.
    Instead of fixing them, our tax goes towards:-
    -building bridges in Greece.
    -building railways in Poland.
    -building sewers in Hungary.
    -building factories in Slovakia.

    etc. Et Fucking Cetra.

      • India, where they have public information films on TV showing people how to take a shit in a loo correctly – and not in the street, on side of a river or off a railway platform like most of the male population.

        Fucking 3rd world shitholes and we send them money, we are truly fucked up.

      • I believe were funding Pakistan’s space program as well. Previously, we were paying for Bin Laden’s B&B as those cunts knew fine well his whereabouts.

  13. My mother’s road has just had a 200 yard stretch completely repaired. We couldn’t believe it. They didn’t just resurface it, they ripped it up completely, right down to the iron works, and rebuilt the whole lot. It was supposed to take two weeks, but they turned up the Monday, two weeks agoa and ripped up the road. Then they had a week off because of the snow. Last Tuesday, they turned up again and rebuilt the entire stretch that they’d ripped up in ONE day. They then left it until last Friday, presumably to set, then they turned up and repainted all the lines. So in all, a job they said would take two weeks, actually took about one week. Which just goes to show that when they tell you something will take two weeks, what they mean is, the job itself will take one week, but they need another week to stand around drinking tea and scratching their arses. And they’ve actually done a pretty good job.

  14. Well done Mrs. B

    As a fellow inhabitant of Essex, I can only agree with the dire state of our roads. Twelve cars (12 fucking cars) had ripped tyres from driving up the A120 to Harwich as the pothole was so deep it was down to the metal mesh (I think builders call it B52).

    The A120 for those not familiar with major highways in the beautiful county of Essex, splits from the A12 at Colchester (Britain’s oldest town – founded by the Romans (whose original fucking roads we still drive on BTW)) on up to Harwich a significant port. So not a twee country lane but a major and important highway. The Cuntcil said they used 360Kg of tarmac to fill the fucking hole.

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