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Farewell potholes? UK team invents self-healing road surface
- noja 2y agoThat’s good news, but why are the roads in the UK so bad to start with? Is it correct to say that roads are funded from a tax on fuel sales?
- flir 2y agoNah, it's not a hypothecated tax. It all goes into the general fund. Same for vehicle tax. In my (mostly uninformed) opinion, a lot of road maintenance was outsourced to the private sector on long (like 20+ years) contracts in the 2000s (2004 for 25 years in my town). Predictable result is predictable.
- walthamstow 2y agoCouncil grants from central govt cut ~40% during austerity too. Pothole fixing and road resurfacing are such an easy choice to cut from budgets because the effect is indirect and isn't immediately seen. People would notice very quickly if their bins weren't being collected.
- Reason077 2y ago> ”People would notice very quickly if their bins weren't being collected.” This was a constant problem at my London council. They collected our rubbish bin reliably, but never our council-supplied recycling bin. Eventually we found out that the rules had changed and recycling had to be put in specially marked clear plastic bags, but the bags were almost impossible to get. You literally had to go to the local library on a specific day of the week to get told “no sorry, the bags didn’t come in this week, try again next week”. They couldn’t make it any more difficult or kafkaesque! Eventually we just learned to take our recycling down the street to an estate building and dump it in their bins. And at the same time this was going on, the same council was spending money on billboards and bus stop advertising encouraging people to recycle! Tower Hamlets, you are the absolute worst!
- OJFord 2y agoMy wife was in a flat in Wandsworth for a bit, through which I learnt they're not actually required to do recycling collection. Landlord provided a communal refuse bin, but no recycling. Wandsworth won't collect bags on street from residents above businesses (but those businesses can put bags on street twice a week, that's no problem). I think they suggested a couple of recycling centres it could be taken to, but who really is doing that, especially without a car.
- rich_sasha 2y agoIn a similar vein: it turns out councils are only liable for pothole-related damage if they know about the pothole - i.e. if it was reported or they found it themselves. Maybe fair enough. But the county of Gloucestershire fixed the issue by ceasing all pothole inspections. If they don't know about them, they aren't liable. On this basis, they reject 97% of all claims.
- youngtaff 2y agoBased on our experience many of the potholes around us (in Gloucestershire) get fixed
- rich_sasha 2y agoMy source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crlnwdy0e72o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crlnwdy0e72o
- flir 2y agoYou could probably wardrive that data....
- walthamstow 2y agoTower Hamlets is absolutely the worst borough in London. It's dirty and it stinks - and that's just the election results! They make bankrupt Croydon look respectable.
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- spiderfarmer 2y agoProbably like most countries. There's budget for new projects, but never enough for maintaining them. And like with all maintenance, not doing it will lead to higher costs down the road.
- lijok 2y agoBad relative to what? From my perspective UK roads are a pleasure.
- blitzar 2y agoLots of rain and its erosion effects. Nevertheless UK roads are some of the least potholed I have come across. I believe that potholes are the responsibility of councils - so neither (income) tax nor fuel sales are linked to the funding.
- jimnotgym 2y agoYou should try more remote areas. If you have to pass another car on the lanes around here, expect to hear your suspension bottom out
- jimnotgym 2y agoThe roads in England are terrible, the roads in the rest of the UK are far better. I live in England and commute to Wales, you can hear when you cross the border.
- davidwritesbugs 2y agoAgree. Live on Welsh/English border & this is a known phenomenon. Some rural Welsh roads are glorious.
- rich_sasha 2y agoChronic underinvestment. Since ~2010, the UK started cutting costs everywhere. Current costs were harder to cut, broadly speaking investments were cut more. Things like fixing roads was on the list - because a slightly broken road is still mostly usable. But of course that cascades quickly into an unmanageable mess of potholes. It's also one of those things where small frequent repairs are presumably cheaper in the long run than leaving things until you can't ignore them anymore, then having a major repair job to do.
- esperent 2y agoWhat I've heard (with regards to Irish roads) is that it's several wet months each year where the ground temperature frequently goes above and below zero degrees. So the water keeps filling any small cracks, freezing and expanding, then defrosting and refilling the now bigger cracks. There's many days in the winter where this process might happen several times over a single 24 hour cycle. It's basically the worst possible scenario for road longevity, or any kind of buildings. However, while this sounds plausible, I don't know if it's actually true. I haven't heard it confirmed by a civil engineer.
- socks 2y agoAt least in the towns and cities, I believe it is because the utility companies can cut up the roads, but the cuts are never repaired to the same quality, allowing water ingress and creating weaknesses that seem to 'seed' potholes. I used to live in Edinburgh and the roads were like an uneven tar patchwork.
- Eavolution 2y agoWhere we lived the road was very country, grass up the middle etc. A gas company went to put mains gas in, and they made such a bad job of the road it was almost undrivable. The council actually made them go back and resurface it fully, after that the road's one of the best around, certainly for the size of it. The damage that gas company did to it and the state they left it in after putting the gas in though was atrocious.
- Developer_Tom 2y agoYes, fuel duty does bring in a lot of money, but it doesn’t go directly into fixing the roads—it generally goes into the government’s general budget. Local councils who are responsible for fixing the roads have been underfunded for years and is normally the area that gets squeezed the most. The British weather doesn’t help too with constant rain and freezing winters…
- vasco 2y agoNo specific tax in any country funds things directly. It's just a ploy to get people to accept new taxes. Every tax is whatever % it is of the global tax revenue and that's it, and if you know what a tax dollar is used for you can look at the overall budget of expenses. For example, if I say I will create a tax to protect the children, exclusively used to fund orphanages, you go oh man that sounds great. But you already have a huge budget and you already have existing taxes you could've raised for that. So the only reason you do it like this is optics and so that later you can repurpose the tax. Reading a bit about historical reasons for some taxes is a good way to learn this. Specific taxes like this can and do modulate demand and can adjust the costs to the actual users, but very rarely for funding isn't it only a sleight of hand.
- hgomersall 2y agoTaxes don't pay for things at all in a monetarily sovereign country. The spending happens from new money creation. The tax (among other things) is about resource liberation to prevent inflationary pressure.
- vasco 2y agoI realize that and agree with this modern view on monetary policy but you cannot say they are totally divorced concepts because deficits do get accounted for based on difference between money raised with taxes and money spent.
- hgomersall 2y ago
- chgs 2y agoPot jokes are typically on local roads. These are funded from councils. Council income is from a property tax, “council tax” and “business rates”. Councils have many spending commitments, my local council about 80% of income goes on “Adult Social Care”, which is basically paying for carers to go to wealthy old people and look after them because while they own a million pound house it would be unfair to expect them to pay for their own care. That leave very little in the pot to pay for local services like bin collections, parks, libraries, and road maintenence.
- OJFord 2y ago> “Adult Social Care”, which is basically paying for carers to go to wealthy old people and look after them because while they own a million pound house it would be unfair to expect them to pay for their own care. That's BS. Adult social care is comically underfunded, needs-assessed, and not to a standard or timeliness that you would choose if you could afford private.
- chgs 2y agoAdult social care is mainly to old people, who typically own their own homes. There was a suggestion in 2017 that people with a lot of wealth could fund their own care even if they aren’t moved to a care home (which is currently the case). Labour and the daily mail joined forces to block this.
- youngtaff 2y agoCouncil income is mostly grants from central government
- flir 2y ago"In 2019/20 (the last year before emergency Covid funding), local authorities in England received 22% of their funding from government grants, 52% from council tax, and 27% from retained business rates." - https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/local-government-funding-england https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/local-go... (I can't accept retained business rates being part of central government funding, but you may see it differently).
- tempestn 2y agoClaims extension of surface lifespan by 30%. Cool if true, though far from an end to potholes.
- picafrost 2y ago> The material could be scaled up for use on British roads in a couple of years, the researchers believe. As per usual these optimistic solutions are inhibited by cost. All municipalities that I’ve lived in have ignored potholes until the complainants become a choir. It is always cheaper this way.
- vasco 2y agoCheaper only because you're subsidizing the cost of the road (by delaying maintenance) from the pocket of the road users which will now collectively have to do maintenance on the car slightly sooner on average, with some people getting the brunt of it if they have an actual accident that requires immediate repair. In some worse cases it even makes a road much slower to traverse in order to deal with the constant bumps, basically returning to the quality of a gravel road, which also has potential economic impacts on "trade".
- tsimionescu 2y agoThat's a very weird use of "subsidizing" there. The corect view is that the local government is subsidizing the maintenance of cars by investing some of its money in making the roads better. Government subsidies like this can absolutely be important and useful, especially if a majority of the population drives, but they should always be looked at conservatively and minimized when possible.
- MarcelOlsz 2y agoI single-handedly got the mayor of my small town to fill in a bunch of potholes on a road leading to my parents place. I have an old car and while the suspension is great, it's destroyed the bottom of my car and multiple valences costing me a lot since it sits so low. I started calling the mayor every single day and we ended up talking for a few hours. Nothing got done until I distributed flyers and went knocking on every single home along my route to my parents on that shitty road and got everyone to call him whenever they could. The road got fixed and has stayed that way. The grand irony is that the hill is so steep that the only way I managed to get up it was with those potholes. Now I have to take the long 5km route around every time because my car can't make it up this smooth dirt road in the winter now as my car is sub-1000 kilos. I think the gas and lost-parts cost has now evened out at least!
- memorydial 2y agoWould be interesting to see if any municipalities have experimented with self-healing surfaces at small scale to gauge cost-effectiveness. If it reduces long-term maintenance, councils might actually save money instead of just patching potholes endlessly.
- haunter 2y agoI live in Hungary and the roads here are incredibly bad with millions of potholes. Hot summers and cold winters doesn’t help either. But what I noticed that if the asphalt has higer mixture of stones (usually they use basalt here) then there are virtually almost no potholes. It’s more loud as the surface is more rough but by my layman experience it’s much more durable. Pure asphalt roads with very little stone content always become pothole minefields quickly. So I just generally don’t know why higher stone content is not a standard. Probably more expensive and maybe because of the sound too. I don’t think it’s more slippery in wet conditions.
- dsego 2y agoMore stones also make asphalt more slippery in wet conditions don't they?
- alexey-salmin 2y agoI think it's the opposite, this kind of asphalt has very rough surface.
- stavros 2y agoIt has a rough surface in the way that it makes it uncomfortable to walk on, but not in the way that tires will grip to it. Stones are oddly-shaped, but slippery.
- PeterStuer 2y agoBut not the right kind of grit rough. The 'stoney' rough asphalts can be extremely slippery when wet, and even dry they then to extend breaking distance. My guess is they also cause more rolling tire wear and slightly more fuel consuption.
- jmb99 2y agoI’m not sure how you could have worse grip when braking (caused by lower friction) while simultaneously increase tire wear (caused by higher friction), unless I’m misunderstanding something.
- liendolucas 2y agoIn Italy (Perugia) not only huge and dangerous potholes (is a disaster overall) but sidewalks maintenance is pretty much abandoned as well. I drive a motorcycle and instead of paying attention to driving I have to put considerable effort looking at the road because I know that if a drive over one of those I'll end up in the ground for sure.
- xandrius 2y agoTo be fair, terrible roads might reduce accidents, reduce speeds, unnecessary vehicle usage, and turn the usual road rage into rage against the road, creating a bond between different drivers rather than antagonism. And it's also a net positive for mechanics and parts manufacturers. Basically a win-win for society (except for drivers, ofc). (partly /s and partly not, as I surprised myself realising how bad roads might actually have positives)
- amarcheschi 2y agoThey also help dentists in getting huge checks because every time I catch a pothole with my road bike my teeth smash
- standardUser 2y agoI think that's a stretch. The nations with the best road/transit systems and the most law-abiding drivers are invariably the most prosperous.
- liendolucas 2y agoYeah, no... In Argentina when you see two cars that collided, or rolled killing almost complete families due to road conditions, that doesn't seem to fit as a win-win for society. Roads and sidewalks have to be properly maintained, otherwise do not charge me taxes for my license's plate.
- UberFly 2y ago"To make the self-healing bitumen, the researchers mixed in tiny porous plant spores soaked in recycled oils. When the road surface is compressed by passing traffic, it squeezes the spores, which release their oil into any nearby cracks. The oils soften the bitumen enough for it to flow and seal the cracks." Are we really buying this?
- PeterStuer 2y agoIt's a lab experiment on a tiny crack. There is as far as the article goes zero real world data.
- bell-cot 2y ago> Are we really buying this? No. I'd figure that most HNer's know The Guardian has a strong "optimistic fluff" bias, and some of us feel like venting our spleens about potholes and poorly-maintained roads.
- DevelopingElk 2y agoMy understanding is that yes, in some circumstances this can help inhibit crack formation. The place where it won't has to do with settlement, where the soil beneath the rose sinks unevenly. This is a major initiator of pothole formation. Road construction is tightly cost constrained, so this will come down to exact price.
- PeterStuer 2y agoThe easiert way to extend road surface life is to go zero tolerance and place extreme penalties on weight limit exceeding trucks. This will ofc not eliminate resurfacing need, but the impact of excessive load is a very substantial part of road wear.
- bell-cot 2y agoTrue. But when a tiny minority (folks with heavy trucks) have an intense interest in getting away with something, while the vast majority can't be bothered to pay any attention to the issue...
- egorfine 2y agoPotholes are political problem, not technical.