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A hole lot of trouble on resort roads
IT is one of the biggest headaches for drivers everywhere.
Travelling along the road and suddenly half your wheel disappears into a hole. And then it happens half-a-mile down the same stretch of highway.
Recent research from the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) shows that maintenance teams are now having to fill in more than one million potholes a year.
And around 5,000 of them can be found in Blackpool alone.
The crisis recalls the Beatles' song, A Day in the Life, and its famous line of "4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire" which was written by Lennon and McCartney after reading a newspaper report in 1967.
Fylde and Wyre fair slightly better but the latter is one of the worst offenders in Lancashire when it comes to having dips in the tarmac.
On average, local authorities spend more than 1m of its budget on filling in these holes every 12 months, with maintenance teams stretched to the limit when it comes to plugging the hole left by the sheer weight of traffic.
But highways bosses across the three boroughs say the vast majority of pesky potholes can be blamed on one simple issue – bad road surfaces.
Peter Cross, head of network management and engineering at Blackpool council, said: "In the last year alone we filled in around 5,000 potholes in Blackpool.
"There is no one area which is a hotspot. The town centre has constant heavy traffic but the roads are generally in a better state of repair.
"The council has spent more than 1.2m on highway maintenance in the past year, with a lot of that funding going to fixing the potholes.
"We have one man and his van going out to look at potholes when they are reported to us. If he can fix them then and there he will, if not, it gets passed on to the road maintenance vehicles."
Over the past 12 months, The Gazette has reported on dozens of stories where members of the public have called to complain about the pothole problem.
In April, taxi drivers said Whitegate Drive, Clifton Road, Newton Drive and Grasmere Road were particular hotspots.
In July, Blackpool town hall bosses said they were upgrading some of the roads in the resort with the profits they made from the sale of Blackpool International Airport.
Last year, it was revealed that 2.7m would be spent on the road network, including resurfacing and accident blackspots.
But Mr Cross insists the problem in Blackpool isn't that bad. He added: “In terms of the bigger picture, the pothole problem in Blackpool really is not that bad.
“We are constantly working to eradicate the problem but bad road surfacing is a problem which will never go away.”
A spokesman for Lancashire County Council said: “Government subsidies for road maintenance have fallen substantially while the cost of carrying out the work has increased.
“From 1974 to 1994 the county council spent the equivalent of 54m in today’s money on road maintenance each year, but falling subsidies mean we could only spend approximately 31.5m last year.”
AIA chairman Jim Crick said: “The number of potholes is an indicator of the general poor condition of the local road network. This level of patch-and-mend work is very inefficient use of resources, but highways engineers say they are in a Catch 22 situation.
‘’When a road surface is left without regular maintenance for too long it becomes vulnerable to changing weather conditions and will eventually crack. Left unchecked, this leads to the creation of potholes.”
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Weather for Blackpool
Wednesday 30 May 2012
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Temperature: 12 C to 20 C
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