Britain’s roads – to deteriorate further ?
Hotter summers, colder winters equate to deterioration in road surfaces and this last winter, many potholes suddenly appeared, wreaking havoc with car suspensions, tyres and potentially causing crashes. This has cost Council’s dear at a time when their budgets are being cut back. So how are they responding ?
It appears there will now be a new definition of when a pothole can be considered to be a pothole.
Under new guidelines from the London Borough of Lambeth, set to be copied by many other councils, holes of less than 1.57 inches (40mm) in depth will not be repaired. Under the existing rules the benchmark was depth of over 0.98in (25mm).
Parliamentary research has indicated a massive cost of pothole repairs of £13 billion a year.
Lambeth have also reduced the regularity of their road inspections from every four months to every six months.