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.
> ”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!
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.
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.
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.
Location-wise, I really enjoyed living there. Close to everything with great cycle routes. Easy access to fast tube/Elizabeth line connections. Some nice parks, and great walking/running routes along the canals/docks/river. Quick walk (or illegal cycle) through the tunnel to Greenwich.
But you're right, politically it's a disaster! During one of the general elections a few years back there was a local referendum held on the same night about how the mayoral governance was going to work in the borough. Rahman (who's now the mayor) actually had his thugs posted at the doors accosting voters as they arrived and urging them to vote for his preferred option. Police were there keeping an eye on them but didn't seem to be intervening. Guess this sort of electoral interference is okay in Tower Hamlets!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
It's important framing as it counters the prevalent view that the government can only spend once they have scraped together sufficient buckaroos into the necessary account, either through tax income or borrowing. From what you say, you get it, but most people do not. It's also important because it recognises that spending must preceed tax as a matter of causality. By necessity the consolidated government's cash accounts must be negative.
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.
> “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.
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.
"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-go...
(I can't accept retained business rates being part of central government funding, but you may see it differently).
> The material could be scaled up for use on British roads in a couple of years, the researchers believe.
As per usual these optimistic solutions are inhibited by cost. All municipalities that I’ve lived in have ignored potholes until the complainants become a choir. It is always cheaper this way.
Cheaper only because you're subsidizing the cost of the road (by delaying maintenance) from the pocket of the road users which will now collectively have to do maintenance on the car slightly sooner on average, with some people getting the brunt of it if they have an actual accident that requires immediate repair. In some worse cases it even makes a road much slower to traverse in order to deal with the constant bumps, basically returning to the quality of a gravel road, which also has potential economic impacts on "trade".
That's a very weird use of "subsidizing" there. The corect view is that the local government is subsidizing the maintenance of cars by investing some of its money in making the roads better. Government subsidies like this can absolutely be important and useful, especially if a majority of the population drives, but they should always be looked at conservatively and minimized when possible.
I single-handedly got the mayor of my small town to fill in a bunch of potholes on a road leading to my parents place. I have an old car and while the suspension is great, it's destroyed the bottom of my car and multiple valences costing me a lot since it sits so low. I started calling the mayor every single day and we ended up talking for a few hours.
Nothing got done until I distributed flyers and went knocking on every single home along my route to my parents on that shitty road and got everyone to call him whenever they could.
The road got fixed and has stayed that way. The grand irony is that the hill is so steep that the only way I managed to get up it was with those potholes. Now I have to take the long 5km route around every time because my car can't make it up this smooth dirt road in the winter now as my car is sub-1000 kilos. I think the gas and lost-parts cost has now evened out at least!
Could the mayor have been better focusing their time and efforts on broader issues, rather than just to stop a bunch of people from repeatedly calling him?
How much time and effort do you think it takes the mayor himself to authorize a crew to repair potholes? He's not going to go do it himself. Hopefully the government will already know how much it costs to repair a given length of road.
If you do not fill cracks in roads you get potholes. Lack of cheap maintenance causes expensive repairs and reduces the lifespan of a road. Typical shortsightedness.
If you see black lines in an asphalt road (which are not straight) the odds are good you have a municipality which does maintenance.
Would be interesting to see if any municipalities have experimented with self-healing surfaces at small scale to gauge cost-effectiveness. If it reduces long-term maintenance, councils might actually save money instead of just patching potholes endlessly.
I live in Hungary and the roads here are incredibly bad with millions of potholes. Hot summers and cold winters doesn’t help either.
But what I noticed that if the asphalt has higer mixture of stones (usually they use basalt here) then there are virtually almost no potholes. It’s more loud as the surface is more rough but by my layman experience it’s much more durable. Pure asphalt roads with very little stone content always become pothole minefields quickly.
So I just generally don’t know why higher stone content is not a standard. Probably more expensive and maybe because of the sound too. I don’t think it’s more slippery in wet conditions.
It has a rough surface in the way that it makes it uncomfortable to walk on, but not in the way that tires will grip to it. Stones are oddly-shaped, but slippery.
But not the right kind of grit rough. The 'stoney' rough asphalts can be extremely slippery when wet, and even dry they then to extend breaking distance.
My guess is they also cause more rolling tire wear and slightly more fuel consuption.
I’m not sure how you could have worse grip when braking (caused by lower friction) while simultaneously increase tire wear (caused by higher friction), unless I’m misunderstanding something.
The stones are usually not that big and the bitumen makes it more even anyway. The bicycle paths at my place use a semi coarse variant which is fine and drains quite a bit of water.
I did a road trip through Europe a few years back, and when we passed from Romania (coming from Cluj) to Hungary, the road immediately got _comically_ bad. As we got closer to Budapest things seemed to improve, but wow, I vividly remember this.
I'd be curious to learn whether it's a lack of maintenance (Hungary generally seemed well maintained except for the roads though) or something else.
Lack of maintenance and it’s a generally corrupt country. Stealing is not a crime (especially from public funds) but an act of bravery. There are no consequences.
My theory that construction companies here work as a cartel. For them making good roads is not a business > less projects later. So keeping up
the status quo with low quality is a better business, there is always something to fix and repair and also more opportunity to steal public money.
> Lack of maintenance and it’s a generally corrupt country. Stealing is not a crime (especially from public funds) but an act of bravery. There are no consequences.
Welcome to EU. Is there any EU country where this is not a fact ?
I'm in Germany, and while I'm sure we have some corruption (I believe every country has at least a little bit), I'm not aware of it as a systemic problem.
With our previous (and how it's looking, next) government there was a scandal around masks in Covid times, and a few others I think.
But nothing to the point of causing major disrepair of infrastructure. Our rail infrastructure is famously in need of maintenance, but from all I know that's more a matter of stupidity than malice (Hanlon's Razor and all that).
While some might just denounce it as bureaucracy, we do have a lot of regulation, oversight and checks and balances. Which causes it's own issues (like having to pick the cheapest suppliers from an extended process).
But I believe there are some EU countries where corruption in itself is a problem.
well as you name the rail infrastructure: it was sold out and left to despair since the 1970s. This was clearly lobbying from the automotive industry. Similarly in the USA, tramlines where teared down in many cities.
I lived in Belgium, close to the Dutch border. When you take the E314 East, it is insane how the quality of the road improves once you cross the Meuse/Maas into the Netherlands.
The asphalt becomes so smooth and quiet. No potholes.
Until it rains. Then the rain seems to stay on top of it. Meaning a lot more fine water mist being produced by cars driving over it.
A higher aggregate mix sounds more like Tarmacadam (i.e. tarmac) although probably with a bituminous (rather than tar) binder these days.
The higher aggregate mix generally doesn't make for a more durable road though, but there's far more to a good road than just the materials its made from.
In Italy (Perugia) not only huge and dangerous potholes (is a disaster overall) but sidewalks maintenance is pretty much abandoned as well. I drive a motorcycle and instead of paying attention to driving I have to put considerable effort looking at the road because I know that if a drive over one of those I'll end up in the ground for sure.
To be fair, terrible roads might reduce accidents, reduce speeds, unnecessary vehicle usage, and turn the usual road rage into rage against the road, creating a bond between different drivers rather than antagonism.
And it's also a net positive for mechanics and parts manufacturers. Basically a win-win for society (except for drivers, ofc).
(partly /s and partly not, as I surprised myself realising how bad roads might actually have positives)
Yeah, no... In Argentina when you see two cars that collided, or rolled killing almost complete families due to road conditions, that doesn't seem to fit as a win-win for society.
Roads and sidewalks have to be properly maintained, otherwise do not charge me taxes for my license's plate.
"To make the self-healing bitumen, the researchers mixed in tiny porous plant spores soaked in recycled oils. When the road surface is compressed by passing traffic, it squeezes the spores, which release their oil into any nearby cracks. The oils soften the bitumen enough for it to flow and seal the cracks."
No. I'd figure that most HNer's know The Guardian has a strong "optimistic fluff" bias, and some of us feel like venting our spleens about potholes and poorly-maintained roads.
My understanding is that yes, in some circumstances this can help inhibit crack formation.
The place where it won't has to do with settlement, where the soil beneath the rose sinks unevenly. This is a major initiator of pothole formation. Road construction is tightly cost constrained, so this will come down to exact price.
True. But when a tiny minority (folks with heavy trucks) have an intense interest in getting away with something, while the vast majority can't be bothered to pay any attention to the issue...
77 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadIn 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.
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.
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!
I think they suggested a couple of recycling centres it could be taken to, but who really is doing that, especially without a car.
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.
But you're right, politically it's a disaster! During one of the general elections a few years back there was a local referendum held on the same night about how the mayoral governance was going to work in the borough. Rahman (who's now the mayor) actually had his thugs posted at the doors accosting voters as they arrived and urging them to vote for his preferred option. Police were there keeping an eye on them but didn't seem to be intervening. Guess this sort of electoral interference is okay in Tower Hamlets!
I believe that potholes are the responsibility of councils - so neither (income) tax nor fuel sales are linked to the funding.
I live in England and commute to Wales, you can hear when you cross the border.
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.
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.
I used to live in Edinburgh and the roads were like an uneven tar patchwork.
The damage that gas company did to it and the state they left it in after putting the gas in though was atrocious.
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…
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.
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.
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.
(I can't accept retained business rates being part of central government funding, but you may see it differently).
As per usual these optimistic solutions are inhibited by cost. All municipalities that I’ve lived in have ignored potholes until the complainants become a choir. It is always cheaper this way.
Nothing got done until I distributed flyers and went knocking on every single home along my route to my parents on that shitty road and got everyone to call him whenever they could.
The road got fixed and has stayed that way. The grand irony is that the hill is so steep that the only way I managed to get up it was with those potholes. Now I have to take the long 5km route around every time because my car can't make it up this smooth dirt road in the winter now as my car is sub-1000 kilos. I think the gas and lost-parts cost has now evened out at least!
If you see black lines in an asphalt road (which are not straight) the odds are good you have a municipality which does maintenance.
But what I noticed that if the asphalt has higer mixture of stones (usually they use basalt here) then there are virtually almost no potholes. It’s more loud as the surface is more rough but by my layman experience it’s much more durable. Pure asphalt roads with very little stone content always become pothole minefields quickly.
So I just generally don’t know why higher stone content is not a standard. Probably more expensive and maybe because of the sound too. I don’t think it’s more slippery in wet conditions.
My guess is they also cause more rolling tire wear and slightly more fuel consuption.
I'd be curious to learn whether it's a lack of maintenance (Hungary generally seemed well maintained except for the roads though) or something else.
My theory that construction companies here work as a cartel. For them making good roads is not a business > less projects later. So keeping up the status quo with low quality is a better business, there is always something to fix and repair and also more opportunity to steal public money.
Welcome to EU. Is there any EU country where this is not a fact ?
With our previous (and how it's looking, next) government there was a scandal around masks in Covid times, and a few others I think.
But nothing to the point of causing major disrepair of infrastructure. Our rail infrastructure is famously in need of maintenance, but from all I know that's more a matter of stupidity than malice (Hanlon's Razor and all that).
While some might just denounce it as bureaucracy, we do have a lot of regulation, oversight and checks and balances. Which causes it's own issues (like having to pick the cheapest suppliers from an extended process).
But I believe there are some EU countries where corruption in itself is a problem.
The asphalt becomes so smooth and quiet. No potholes.
Until it rains. Then the rain seems to stay on top of it. Meaning a lot more fine water mist being produced by cars driving over it.
The higher aggregate mix generally doesn't make for a more durable road though, but there's far more to a good road than just the materials its made from.
And it's also a net positive for mechanics and parts manufacturers. Basically a win-win for society (except for drivers, ofc).
(partly /s and partly not, as I surprised myself realising how bad roads might actually have positives)
Roads and sidewalks have to be properly maintained, otherwise do not charge me taxes for my license's plate.
Are we really buying this?
No. I'd figure that most HNer's know The Guardian has a strong "optimistic fluff" bias, and some of us feel like venting our spleens about potholes and poorly-maintained roads.
The place where it won't has to do with settlement, where the soil beneath the rose sinks unevenly. This is a major initiator of pothole formation. Road construction is tightly cost constrained, so this will come down to exact price.
This will ofc not eliminate resurfacing need, but the impact of excessive load is a very substantial part of road wear.