5 ms·

That’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?

by noja 2y ago

flir 2y ago
Nah, 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 ago
  Council 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 ago
      My 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 ago
      In 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 ago
        Based on our experience many of the potholes around us (in Gloucestershire) get fixed
        rich_sasha 2y ago
        My source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crlnwdy0e72o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crlnwdy0e72o
      - flir 2y ago
        You could probably wardrive that data....
    - walthamstow 2y ago
      Tower 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.
      - 2y ago
spiderfarmer 2y ago
Probably 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 ago
Bad relative to what? From my perspective UK roads are a pleasure.
- flir 2y ago
  Relative to UK roads thirty years ago, they're not great.
- bigfudge 2y ago
  Relative to France, Germany, Holland etc etc
blitzar 2y ago
Lots 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 ago
  You 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Agree. Live on Welsh/English border & this is a known phenomenon. Some rural Welsh roads are glorious.
rich_sasha 2y ago
Chronic 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 ago
What 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 ago
At 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 ago
  Where 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  No 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 ago
    Taxes 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 ago
      I 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 ago
Pot 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 ago
    Adult 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 ago
  Council 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).

That’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?

by noja 2y ago

That’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 ago

Nah, 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 ago
Council 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 ago
    My 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 ago
    In 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 ago
      Based on our experience many of the potholes around us (in Gloucestershire) get fixed
      - rich_sasha 2y ago
        My source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crlnwdy0e72o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crlnwdy0e72o
    - flir 2y ago
      You could probably wardrive that data....
  - walthamstow 2y ago
    Tower 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.
    - 2y ago

spiderfarmer 2y ago

Probably 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 ago

Bad relative to what? From my perspective UK roads are a pleasure.

flir 2y ago
Relative to UK roads thirty years ago, they're not great.
bigfudge 2y ago
Relative to France, Germany, Holland etc etc

blitzar 2y ago

Lots 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 ago
You 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 ago

The 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 ago
Agree. Live on Welsh/English border & this is a known phenomenon. Some rural Welsh roads are glorious.

rich_sasha 2y ago

Chronic 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 ago

What 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 ago

At 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 ago
Where 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 ago

Yes, 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 ago
No 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 ago
  Taxes 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 ago
    I 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 ago

Pot 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 ago
  Adult 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 ago
Council 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).