The state of our Roads

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emerald green

Private Member
Joined
Jan 12, 2006
I've just done a quick google, and it suggests the cost of fixing all the pot holes in the UK could be as much as £18.6B. That is quite a sum.
I then did another search, and asked what the UK Government collects in Vehicle tax in a year, and its approx £32B!

Begs the question; why are our roads in such a state, and what are the UK govt doing with this tax. Thats a scandal imo
 
costs to drivers estimated at 1.8 billion a year too - that's a tidy earner for whoever owns kwik fit now and the taxman - Ryan'll be along in a mo to say Rachel Reeves was seen out with a pneumatic jack hammer to help pay for the triple lock....
 
emerald green said:
I've just done a quick google, and it suggests the cost of fixing all the pot holes in the UK could be as much as £18.6B. That is quite a sum.
I then did another search, and asked what the UK Government collects in Vehicle tax in a year, and its approx £32B!

Begs the question; why are our roads in such a state, and what are the UK govt doing with this tax. Thats a scandal imo
Click to expand...
Not the UK C, this is just England and Wales. Probably add a few billion for Scotland and N.I.
 
I heard that many of the country’s roads have at best 5 years of structural safety left - gonna take a shitload of oil to replace them.
 
Road tax is really called Vehicle Excise Duty and has got nothing to do with paying for road maintenance. It’s another tax but on the vehicle you own. The sums generated just go to the treasury like every other tax.

Roads infrastructure is crumbling for more reasons than lack of investment. A few years ago the government authorised larger, heavier lorries to be used with the idea being that one bigger lorry can carry as much as two smaller ones thereby reducing the amount of fuel emissions with there being fewer vehicles on the roads. Except that didn’t happen.

Then there has been the ‘explosion’ in battery powered electric vehicles. Your electric variant of the same internal combustion engine car is considerably heavier due to the batteries. Again this takes its toll on roadways that were never engineered to withstand these much heavier loads. See also multi storey car parks. Has anyone noticed that there are big sections of multi storey car parks taped or coned off to prevent parking? It’s because these structures weren’t built to withstand the extra weight of electric vehicles so they have to limit the capacity.

As for repairing pot holes, the entirety of the UK is financially screwed so there isn’t the money to pay the roadworkers and the massive rise in materials.

Recently I’ve been driving the wife through to the WGH for treatment and I’m never going to complain about the roads in West Lothian again having endured the roads in Edinburgh. City drivers have my sympathy.
 
Keepitgreen said:
Aye Edinburgh roads are absolutely atrocious. It's a scandal. As for fixing them, I like this company as it recycles plastics to make asphalt. More of this please:

MacRebur | The Plastic Road Company

Sustainable Polymers for Asphalt
www.macrebur.com
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Aye. They’re needing to come up with new technologies to give the country’s infrastructure some resilience to modern times. A lot of the problems we’re facing now is down to cost cutting and cheap materials in the 60s and 70s. See the use of RAAC used in construction as another example
 
Would it work for holes too?

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