I guess I just meant generally-speaking. I think I’ve seen several articles how the government is being called upon to just re-lay existing roads in lieu of a new roads building programme, arguing that it was a better investment.
Well a new road (or widening a road) is a strategic infrastructure decision. Re-surfacing roads just makes the existing ones more usable. They do deteriorate over time side from the potholes, e.g. reduced grip on the surface. When you have a limited budget, you can relay a lot more existing road than you can build new ones.
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Didn’t read the article did you.
Erm time and money? Thought that was pretty obvious.
Someone would still need to check before sending a contractor with all their kit and materials.
Seriously though, there’s obviously better ways of doing it but the reality is that procuring and the managing highway contracts sucks up so much of what is already an inadequate budget combined with everything else they have to do, councils have been looking at what their minimum legal works are and where the risk is. Plus the stuff that a council highways department has to cover is pretty vast. Much more than people realise.
I spent over 10 years as a PM for a consultant managing highway structures for local authorities. One council that didnt have a huge area to cover had a maintence backlog on their highway structures (not roads) of over £10m. They had a maintenance budget of £50-£60k a year and a starting capital budget of £225k to £250k.
Out of the £50k they had to do their structural inspections, emergency and general maintenance. It never got close to finishing it.
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It just strikes me that it was far quicker and cheaper when these things were all in house. I can remember getting a dropped curb put in in the early 2000s which was about £100. You had to wait until the council road team had some free time but it was done in a few weeks. A couple of years later, one of my neighbours had the same thing done and it was £1500. The difference being that the work was outsourced. I’m assuming that the vast chunk of that was sheer profit.
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Cost, but we all know it doesnt last. Traffic management can cost over £600/day minimum, then planing off, and reinstatement.
You could do a better stepped repair but again time and cost.
In a lot of instances the pothole is the result of a deeper failure in lower base layers. They ultimateiy just do holding repairs until its worth going after the whole lot deeper down.
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And here is the scandal of it. The only way councils could demonstrate cost cutting is by shedding staff. But they still have an enormous workload of legal obligations to fulfill. So they hire a consultant (my old job) to do their design stuff abd in many instances manage the whole lot. They also hire a highways contractor. Both were tendered on a 3-5 year cycle and it all comes out the one pot of the highways budget.
So they saved money in year one by losing staff but do less and less year on year because their overall highway budget hasnt changed.
Your drop kerb is exactly that but they were able to charge you for it.
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Illegitimi non carborundum
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You’re working like the council. Imagine the council has a flat bed transit, 3 guys and a bed full of tools. They drive round the area filling any pothole they see. Now have 5 of them. They report to ONE boss with photos of before and after, Very simple and saves a huge amount of red tape. An initial site survey for a pot hole repair? You’re thinking like NASA / Warrington Council.
Read my other posts above.
I know thats the way to do it. No need to be a brain to come up with that. Even Musk could think of it.
Really? It sounds horribly inefficient to me. Think of the mileage they’d have to rack up in order to get that done, not to mention doing so at a low speed in order to spot the potholes, and then the man-hours doing so.
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You don’t spend a lot of time in England watching council workers do you? Presume you also don’t drive as currently our roads are more hole than tarmac.
AI creates jobs. Do these people have half an IQ point between them?
Not too bad. Rolling traffic management and you pick a road / area and off you go. They are rough assed repairs though.
There are machines that will do it too. Still need the rolling TM though and so on.
Key bit is having enough to go at while making sure your blacktop repair material stays within its usable spec.
Uk needs to get into some industries of some kind. I guess Starmer see’s this as one.
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But employing people to setup a tech which makes them unemployed is not exactly strategic thinking. Unless they setup the AI tech to come up with ideas for jobs? Ah yes, filling in pot holes. Bleeding genius there alright. Give me strenght!
TBH, I don’t know where he is heading with the AI thing. It sounds a bit like in the 1990s when every exec said that they needed to rush out and buy an internet.
Like any other form of automation, AI can do donkey work. It can improve productivity. I could see it making a big difference in something like medical screening, but it isn’t going to replace the hands on stuff.
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Doesn’t that presuppose that the particular road you’re resurfacing already is full of potholes for which the repair makes sense? At that rate, wouldn’t it simply make more sense to re-lay the road?
Otherwise, isn’t it extremely time consuming to have to go over the entire road to spot each pothole and repair?
No. A typical repair will be roughly an hour say.
Relaying say 10m or even 100m of road is minimum 3 days for just the surface layer.
Day 1- plane out old surface
Day 2 - lay new surface course
Day 3 - new road markings.
The costs dont scale either. Mobilisation rate for the contractor to relay a road will be several £1000’s on its own. Thats just to turn up!
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