Yesterday a stretch of road I regularly use was closed all day for repairs. Nothing new there and indeed the surface was badly cracked and contained many potholes of varying depth. Repairs were long overdue. As a cyclist I found the road very bad to ride along.
Having closed the whole road, in both directions you would expect the highways team to arrive, strip back the road surface, make any necessary deeper repairs and then resurface the road.
But no, it seems that some of the potholes were clearly not important enough to fix, similarly some of the cracks in the surface. What was actually done was selected areas of the road, probably between eighty and ninety percent of the surface, were stripped back and resurfaced. This left a patchwork quilt of unrepaired areas. Had these been pristine road surface then I could have understood the logic, save money perhaps, but no.
It may even not have saved any money, because I think the job would have taken less time and manpower if the whole stretch had been resurfaced rather than doing a patchwork job which then involved selectively cutting out areas.
What we are left with therefore is a road that is good in parts, but where the unrepaired areas will have to be done as a separate job. I am no expert but I also suspect that the joins may well be a weak area which could soon allow water in and start the cracking process all over again.
And just to add insult to (potential) injury, in some areas the strip either side of the centre line has been repaired but the areas where cyclists and motorbike riders will ride has been left unrepaired.
I will report back when the next round of repairs on this road is undertaken.
And our councils wonder why they are struggling financially!
No comments:
Post a Comment