'Huge' pothole damages 30 cars in one evening leaving dozens of motorists stranded
Motorists have complained after a ‘huge’ pothole damaged 30 cars in one night, leaving some drivers waiting hours for assistance.
The hole was several inches deep and filled with water, making it difficult to see as vehicles approached it after dark.
Those caught up in the chaos on Monday said it was lucky there hadn’t been a serious accident at the spot on the B1062 between Beccles and Bungay in Suffolk, where the speed limit is 50mph.
A mobile tyre replacement fitter called out to several jobs at the spot admitted the epidemic of potholes on roads as councils direct resources elsewhere was good business for him – but costly for drivers.
The roads are rough in our bit of Derbyshire and even main roads are in a worse state than previous years. There was almost a third-world look to a short stretch of urban road I drove on yesterday.
Yes the roads are being patched, but the patches don't seem to last and meanwhile enough new potholes appear to overtake the rate of patching.
Our friendly bus driver says the roads he drives on are in the worst he's ever seen. He's clumping in and out of potholes all day long and can't even weave around the big ones to avoid them.
13 comments:
Clearly we need a 'Pothole Tsar' to run a new Pothole QUANGO about how to build a database of potholes, assess their priority, and decide how to fund fixing them. There will also need to be a pothole working party to consider the best methodologies to use.
To make sure everyone is involved the organisation will have to be replicated for English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland variants, so we will need a Supreme Pothole Tsar and Coordination Steering Panel.
We will also need a serious academic to write a history of the Potholes, and a later Inquiry into why all the expensive bureaucracy failed to make things better.
There will also be other academics posing the question "Are potholes and example of Whiteness" and some bright spark will write a play or use interpretive dance to examine the implicit racism of filling potholes.
Did I miss anything?
DJ - good point, something which might be worth adding would be the launch of a pothole satellite specially designed to investigate the causal links between climate change, fossil fuels and potholes. Maybe an AI system ought to be in there too
For "patches" read "bodges". My brother-in-law worked on every aspect of the roads in Lincolnshire for forty years and has nothing but contempt for the state of today's standards of "maintenance".
Pothole Tsar ... sounds a sought after position.
Isn’t it always pothole season?
There was a similar incident on an A road near here recently - 60 limit and a stretch where people (ahem!) often go faster. The tyre fitter who eventually arrived said it was his fourth call-out in the last week to that very location. He was quite ok with that - think of the overtime!
And as for the public road at the end of my drive, well third world would be a good description.
We bought a new car last year. The show room explained,
when I expressed my surprise, that it didn't have a spare wheel for petrol saving purposes. It had a puncture repair kit. Ok for a nail perhaps, but useless for the lacerations inflicted by a pot hole. I bought a spare for £90 on ebay - the showroom accessories dept wanted. £550 for one.
Potholes are a serious problem that will likely never go away, but now I've got to get my head round the idea of there being a mobile tyre fitter who can actually make money off this.
Do people not carry spare wheels that they fit themselves any longer?
Jannie - interesting but not surprising, almost as if the standard followed is designed to fail within a few years and create more work.
James - with a good pension and some foreign travel.
Peter - that reminds me, I've seen more mobile tyre fitter vans over the past few years - I wonder why? Our niece had an alloy wheel ruined by a pothole, it's like broken window economics.
Tammly - all we have is a puncture repair kit but I'd rather have a spare wheel.
Bucko - we don't carry a spare wheel in either car, just puncture repair kits. I believe it's normal these days.
I maybe could have got away with a puncture repair kit over the years, but Mrs B has had a tyre completely shredded on the motorway, so it would have been useless for that
I know that if you call the AA or such for a flat tyre and you don't have a functioning spare, you're not fully covered (They will get you to safety and charge you for anything else) I assume they must class a repair kit as a suitable alternative to a spare if they are the norm now...
Hardly any new cars come with spare wheels now. Space saving, weight saving, cost saving. With low-profile tyres and alloy wheels you're quite vulnerable. Those silly cans of gunk only work for some sorts of failures and tyre fitters hate them because the rim ends up clogged and has to be cleaned. I bought space-saver spares for both our cars and haven't regretted it at all - if you get a puncture on a remote single-track road "out in the sticks" you'll wait ages even for another vehicle to appear, and the national recovery firms are likely to say "Where? Where's that then? Oh no, we don't go out there."
Bucko - we'd call the RAC and hope for the best, I don't fancy trying the gunk.
Peter - if we were ever "out in the sticks" I think I'd get a space-saver, but we never are these days, we'd always be easy enough for the RAC to find.
There's a pothole near our house that we refer to as The Abyss. Every now and then it is given a repair that might last maybe 24 hours.
dearieme - when it fills up with rainwater you could float some plastic toy ducks in it, I've seen that done round here.
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