Broken roads - weight of traffic?

[Skeptisk]

I think that has shocked me since returning to the UK after the years away is the state of the roads. I don’t think I would dare ride a motorcycle again as the road surface is so bad with so many, massive pot holes.

I know that lack of maintenance is mainly the problem but I wonder whether modern cars are a problem. Your average car today is far heavier than its equivalent 20 to 30 years ago, has far bigger wheels/tyres and in general much more power and stickier tyres. How much impact do those have on the degradation of the road surface?

[GroundEffect]

Is the road pressure higher than before?

[Sheepshanks]

It's EV's - heavier and with skinnier tyres, so more pressure on the road.

[ambuletz]

in the past 15 years or so i seem to notice the affect busses have had on the roads in london. their weight seems to massively bed and distort the road, heavily noticable around bus stops where its as if the tarmac is pushed down and outwards, in some cases pushing up at the sides and meeting the edge of the curb.

[robsa]

There was a news story the other day saying in five years time 37,000 miles of roads in England and Wales will be undriveable without a further £14bn of investment, due to how quickly they are degrading. It's probably a combination of heavier vehicles, more HGVs, more traffic generally and woefully inadequate investment. Roads around me here in West Sussex are astonishingly bad and getting worse. Repairs when they arrive are a joke.

[Olivergt]

ambuletz said:

in the past 15 years or so i seem to notice the affect busses have had on the roads in london. their weight seems to massively bed and distort the road, heavily noticable around bus stops where its as if the tarmac is pushed down and outwards, in some cases pushing up at the sides and meeting the edge of the curb.

This was the case 35-40 years ago, nothing has changed really.

In North London the bus lane from Tottenham Police Station down to Seven Sisters was forever getting re-done as it was a single lane with kerbs each side, the buses could only ever use the same bit of road, each time they did it, they tried a different surface, from my memory, they used tarmac, then blocks and then ??? I think the blocks lasted a little longer than the tarmac. The lifetime being measured in small single digit years.

[GT9]

Sheepshanks said:

It's EV's - heavier and with skinnier tyres, so more pressure on the road.

Yes of course it is, especially as only 2% of the cars on the road are EVs...
Road damage is a function of axle load to the power of 4.
1 truck does the damage of literally thousands of cars.
EV adoption won't make a blind bit of difference, but it's pretty spectacular barrel scraping to go with that as your explanation at this juncture.

[E63eeeeee...]

It's also noticeable how much worse the repairs and resurfacings are now. Our council seems to have some kind of system that repairs potholes with small, identical rectangles of tarmac, but they don't seem to be able to align the top surface of them so you just get a horrible uneven patch of road that doesn't follow the camber, and presumably it's already falling apart where the lips are higher between the blocks.

And don't get me started on why they can't make roads flat any more either. We've got newly resurfaced roads locally that look and feel like you've driving across a washboard, and I've recently been on quite a lot of motorway that looks new but has regular ridges so it just goes thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk.

[anonymous-user]

I live in Surrey and they are terrible, there are roads that I refuse to drive on now (the road between Fetcham and Cobham is particularly bad). I was driving through Oxshott the other day and one part of the road is so bad now with the entire surface gone that I ended up driving on the wrong side of the road and the driver behind did the same.

I guess it is related to years and years of patching up the road and the winter weather causing the road to disintegrate.

If it carries on like this I am tempted to jack in the car and just get a 4*4 like the "one life, live it" boys have.

I don't know how anyone who has a supercar can drive these cars on the road without wincing ever 10 seconds as they hit another pothole.

[Diderot]

robsa said:

There was a news story the other day saying in five years time 37,000 miles of roads in England and Wales will be undriveable without a further £14bn of investment, due to how quickly they are degrading. It's probably a combination of heavier vehicles, more HGVs, more traffic generally and woefully inadequate investment. Roads around me here in West Sussex are astonishingly bad and getting worse. Repairs when they arrive are a joke.

We’re in coastal West Sussex. As you say the roads are just fked and the ‘repairs’ are made by some geezer with a bag of gravel and a shovel. It’s bad enough in a car, I just can’t imagine how dangerous it would be on a motorbike or bike for that matter.

[GT9]

Joey Deacon said:

I guess it is related to years and years of patching up the road and the winter weather causing the road to disintegrate.

Daily freeze/thaw of water in the road surface is quite regular in UK winters, and given water expands when it freezes of course, it acts like the perfect road destroying mechanism when the conditions are right (or wrong).

Maybe the new weather patterns we are 'enjoying' has a lot to do with it.

[Essarell]

Doesn’t matter where you go in the country our road infrastructure is quite literally falling apart, hgv’s are ripping up the road surface, maintenance is almost non existent although to be fair they’ll never catch up. Just take a look at all the blocked drainage (plants growing) on the widened sections of motorway where there is now no natural runoff to grass or gravel, that causes major aquaplane problems in heavy rain.

I’ve also noticed a big increase in motorway stone strikes to the front of my vehicle especially around the M25.

I was following a cyclist early yesterday morning, built up area and he had to constantly ride round the damaged surface causing him to move out to the middle of the road, hardly a great advert for safe cycling.

[Sheepshanks]

GT9 said:

Yes of course it is, especially as only 2% of the cars on the road are EVs...
Road damage is a function of axle load to the power of 4.
1 truck does the damage of literally thousands of cars.
EV adoption won't make a blind bit of difference, but it's pretty spectacular barrel scraping to go with that as your explanation at this juncture.

I wasn't being serious.

I do recall reading that a fully laden artic causes 64,000 times more wear than a car.

[GT9]

Sheepshanks said:

GT9 said:

Yes of course it is, especially as only 2% of the cars on the road are EVs...
Road damage is a function of axle load to the power of 4.
1 truck does the damage of literally thousands of cars.
EV adoption won't make a blind bit of difference, but it's pretty spectacular barrel scraping to go with that as your explanation at this juncture.

I wasn't being serious.

I do recall reading that a fully laden artic causes 64,000 times more wear than a car.

Missing smiley caught me out, sorry.
We've had some pretty tragic anti-EV stuff this week including linking COVID to EVs...

[ambuletz]

Essarell said:

I was following a cyclist early yesterday morning, built up area and he had to constantly ride round the damaged surface causing him to move out to the middle of the road, hardly a great advert for safe cycling.

there are quite afew bus stops around my area that have terrible tarmac around them, meaning when i'm cycling i have to go completely around it and almost near the white lines in the middle of the road. 95% of road users cant seem to fathom why i'm doing this and get very aggressive

[Debrooker]

Counsils spending less on road maintenance due to having less money available, simples

[Glosphil]

Gloucestershire seem to be particularly good at not repairing large potholes on blind left hand bends. This leaves drivers with the choice of either driving through the potholes or moving onto the 'wrong' side of the road with no view of oncoming traffic.

Many repairs are also very shoddy. One particular road junction has had the same potholes repaired 3 times in the last year. The edges of the repair are not sealed so soon degrade.

[Teddy Lop]

Weight of vehicles is rot. Many countries have lots of heavy vehicles and better roads.

The problem is lack of investment in both the infrastructure and maintenance, with a false economy "bare minimum" attitude to everything car/road related, probably driven/justified by the anti-car sentiment prevalent in the witless ruling class

[Essarell]

Teddy Lop said:

Weight of vehicles is rot. Many countries have lots of heavy vehicles and better roads.

The problem is lack of investment in both the infrastructure and maintenance, with a false economy "bare minimum" attitude to everything car/road related, probably driven/justified by the anti-car sentiment prevalent in the witless ruling class

Possibly but we’re not talking about many countries, we’re talking about ours and the road infrastructure is in no way up to the standard required to cope with the HGV’s.
You can see it specifically round the Scottish Borders where they are now harvesting the timber plantations, roads being torn by traffic they were never designed to cope with and councils / central government that have kicked highway maintenance way down the priority list.

[stogbandard]

Moving from hot rolled asphalt to stone mastic asphalt is one of the main problems. I’ve seen sections on say, the A14 which has the original hot rolled asphalt surface (30 years) then you reach a section resurfaced with stone mastic asphalt that may have been laid in the last 5-10 years full of rutting and potholes.