Bring on Mr Pothole: the classic urban problem finally meets its match

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/29/potholes-classic-urban-problem-finally-meets-match

Version 0 of 1.

“Nice day at mablethorpe today only thing is we’re gonna bike there hope I get to have an ice cream and some candyfloss,” Christian Brown tweeted at 8.02am on 12 February last year. The tweet is still online, but two hours after writing it Brown hit a pothole outside the entrance to a farm in North Willingham, Lincolnshire. The front wheel of his bike, already loose, came off, and he was catapulted head-first on to the road surface. His injuries were so severe that, despite the fact he was wearing his helmet, he later died at Hull Royal Infirmary. He was 40 years old. The pothole was 40mm deep.

To the pointless death of Christian Brown you could add those of Captain Jon Allen, 29, (hit a lorry while swerving to avoid a pothole, Tidworth, 2010); Martyn Uzzell, 51, (thrown in front of a car after hitting a pothole in Giggleswick during a charity bike ride in 2011); Margaret Nicholl, 67 (thrown from her bike after hitting a pothole near Shepton Montague in 2011); Michael Terry, 44 (thrown from his bike after hitting a pothole on his way to work in Birmingham in 2011), the list goes on. For most people, potholes are banal, a minor nuisance, but for a small few they turn out to be catastrophic.

The scale of Britain’s pothole problem is hard to measure. As a wet country our maintenance bill is high, yet as a rich country we should be able to cover it, and a new study by the World Economic Forum suggests that other nations cope much better. On the WEF’s global ‘quality of roads’ list featuring 144 countries, the UK is ranked just 30th, behind France, the Netherlands, Japan, Spain, Germany, the US, Denmark, Canada, Ireland and Belgium.

The surfacing of roads is not a complex process. On to a tough stone substrate you pour layers of asphalt, which is a mixture of aggregate (bits of gravel, slag etc) and bitumen (the heaviest component of crude oil, not tar). The aggregate provides hardness and a certain amount of friction for braking. The bitumen glues everything together, makes the surface waterproof and provides some elasticity so it can withstand heat, cold and the constant punishment from traffic. After around 20 years, give or take, the top layer of bitumen oxidises and becomes brittle. Parts break off, water gets squeezed in under pressure, sometimes the water freezes, and even more cracks start to appear …

“It’s a self-perpetuating cycle with the pothole,” says Rick Ashton of the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA). To stop potholes forming, it seems, you have to remove and replace the top layer of bitumen before it degrades. Yet, according to the AIA’s figures compiled from a survey of local authorities, roads in England and Wales now have an average wait of 68 years between new surfaces. It would take £12bn to return them to a satisfactory condition, and our present system of patching holes costs 20 times as much as a regime of planned resurfacing. As the voice of asphalt manufacturers, the AIA is hardly independent, but it is safe to say that nobody thinks British roads are in great shape. But unlike broken pipes or cables for instance, broken roads do not become unusable. As a result, most people don’t greatly care about them. And as a result of that, perhaps, a small, unfortunate minority learn to care through the cruellest of circumstances.

“Mark Morrell” was what people used to called Mark Morrell in his days as an engineer for British Gas, but since his retirement he’s become more widely known as “Mr Pothole”. In February 2013, he noticed that a nasty hole had opened up on a blind bend on the A422 in Farthinghoe, Northamptonshire. He told the council, who repaired it, but in May another appeared. Again he reported it but this time nothing happened, so he took the matter to the police. “Within two hours of that, surprisingly, they were out there to repair it,” he chuckles.

Police reports are one of several tactics Morrell now employs. By creating a paper trail that leads from a pothole directly to the council, he focuses council minds. “If someone gets injured or killed at that location,” he explains, “they would have to answer in court.” Morrell set up a Facebook group, in which he shared his wisdom, and his belligerent approach, with others. Soon afterwards, he decided how he would spend his retirement.

This May, Morrell carried out a review of Mr Pothole’s first year. “I have had thousands of potholes repaired across the counties I got involved in,” he says. “I’ve had some major road junctions done, and about 20-odd sections resurfaced after I kept complaining and lobbying.” This is a man, remember, who casually quotes the 1980 Highways Act and spends his leisure time reading 14-year-old policy documents from the Department for Transport (DfT). “I’m a bit of a sod for detail,” he says, and you imagine some council officers would happily upgrade that.

The lesson preached by Morrell and other groups, such as Plymouth’s Bikers Against Potholes, is that if you see a pothole you should report it to the council. And with streetrepairs.co.uk, gov.uk/report-pothole or the FixMyStreet or RAC pothole apps, that has become very straightforward. To be certain it gets dealt with, however, you must also be prepared to create more fuss than it takes to fix it.

If you have been hurt, or your car or bike damaged by a pothole, you may be entitled to compensation, in which case tell the council that you plan to claim. “Then use Freedom of Information (FOI) requests,” Morrell advises, “to find out the history of the road for the last two years, the inspection regime, what faults have been identified, and any repairs that have been carried out.” Taking a picture and even measuring the offending hole is a good idea, but only if you can do so in complete safety. Morrell gets up before dawn in order to inspect potholes when the roads are quiet, with a hi-viz jacket and a judiciously parked car.

Yet, if we know how to abolish potholes, thereby making the roads less dangerous, more pleasant, and less expensive, why doesn’t it happen?

The problem, Ashton claims, is that a culture of cure has gradually replaced one of prevention. “Rather than seeing true resurfacing on roads, what you tend to see now is reactive,” he says. “And a lot of local authorities are even setting targets on how many potholes they can fill per season.”

Local authorities, who are responsible for the upkeep of 98% of Britain’s roads (according to the AIA), in turn claim they simply can’t afford the upfront costs of anything but patchwork repair. “Underfunding from successive governments over a number of decades and increasing regularity of extreme weather has plunged our roads into a state of disrepair,” a spokesman from the Local Government Association ventures. To tackle the problem, the LGA proposes that Westminster should invest a further 2p/litre of existing fuel duty over the next decade, ie give them an extra £1bn a year.

The DfT, however, points to the £200m Pothole Fund, pledged to offset the effects of winter floods and storms, and positively bristles at the suggestion that they aren’t doing enough to target the problem. “We have increased funding by more than 27% in this parliamentary term compared with the last one,” a spokesman says. “All in all, we are providing councils in England with more than £10bn from 2010 to 2021 for local highway maintenance, with clear guidance on ensuring it is used efficiently.”

So who is to blame? The statistics and budgets on both sides require close, objective scrutiny, but even then what would that prove? The DfT insists it takes the matter seriously and is trying to make councils prepare proper maintenance plans (although we may not know if they are successful for a decade). And, while local and central government continue to lay the blame at each others’ doors they can also rely on an indifferent public to take only a passing interest. For his part, Mr Pothole blames a mixture of historic underfunding combined with councils’ relationships with contractors happy to work on a constant stream of temporary fixes. Morrell wonders if independent regulation might be the answer - an ‘OfRoad’ of some kind. All we need to do is to stir the nation into rising up and demanding action. Am I right? Hello? Is anyone still reading?