Star comment: Let’s keep on top of potholes
If on one day of every week the council highways officers, and the councillors with responsibility for the roads, were expected to cycle to work, they would very quickly get a feel for the true state of those roads and lanes.
Unless you are unlucky, or the pothole is particularly large, You can avoid potholes in a car, or the suspension will soak it up, and apart from the jolt, there will be no damage.
For those on two wheels coming across a pothole can pitch them off their bicycle at the risk of personal injury. A smooth road surface is a joy for cyclists, but there are not many of them about. Every time they go out for a ride they are taking their chances with a veritable minefield of hazards.
That’s an average of around 12 a day, each and every day of the year.
As Telford & Wrekin is a largely urban area, relatively small geographically, it points to a huge and concentrated – and very expensive – problem.
Shropshire and Powys councils did not respond to the request for information but road users will not need figures to know that those areas are also blighted by potholes.
Filling in potholes is not at the glamorous end of council services and it is not a job which can be done once and forgotten about. It is a never-ending job, like painting the Forth Bridge. There are always going to be more potholes to be filled, especially after hard winters and the damaging effects of severe frosts.
So it can almost seem like wasting money to keep filling them. But if there is no investment in maintaining the roads to a decent standard, they just keep deteriorating to the point where bringing them back up to scratch is far more expensive than it needed to be had the council kept on top of the problem.
Which brings us to the age-old question. Who is going to pay?
Councillor Angela McClements, cabinet member for transport at Telford & Wrekin, says it has suffered a major funding shortfall for road maintenance from the Government.
It gets £1.6 million a year for roads and paths, but to bring them all up to standard would cost another £133m or so, she says. That is quite a shortfall. With financial figures like that, it is depressingly clear that for the foreseeable future councils will be doing little more than papering over the cracks.
