Pot holes

The roads seemed to doing ok till January. But a number of large and deep holes have appeared.

The roads are used as a cash cow to raise money for other things. If there were a closed budget we would have beautiful roads. We spend a quarter of what is raised, depending on what you count. 

Fuel duty has been falling for a while, due to freezing rates, to more efficient cars, fewer miles driven and electrics vehicles, but still generates c. £25bn a year.

Tax discs (VED) raises another £8bn a year and this is rising  Then you have VAT  20% on all those hundreds of thousands of non-business sales each year. Plus all the servicing, tyres, crash repairs etc. which contribute, and insurance tax (the least defensible tax ever).

And £12bn I put back into road repairs and building new roads. But the building bit consumes money. One junction on the M25 has taken 3.5 years. One roundabout took 2 years near me. And putting in emergency telephones and variable speed limits, more than a decades on a handful of motorways sections. The costs were huge and not entirely fair. Not much is left for repairs.

Everything above the £12bn, probably three times that amount, goes on subsidising rail (HS2, the most expensive railway on the world by a big margin at £570m per mile to build, schools hospitals, etc. It means you can claim any change to anything means closing schools and hospitals. It is a manipulative tactic to prevent change.

So you get a quick bit of stuff slapped in the hole. It is known to be a false economy. But just put it off gas been the way for 40 years, it won't change now 

I doubt they will do much before April as the councils will be waiting for next year's budget.

I wonder if we don't need to redesign road tax so as heavier vehicles pay more? Cars are heavier and larger than they were years ago, mostly because of all the safety features, something I would not want to get rid of, but do we really need such massive cars? Electric cars are some of the heaviest, especially teslas and this has an effect on road surfaces. So many people have huge cars, and trucks and don't need them, they're not pulling horse boxes or trailers full of stuff needed for thier jobs. We seem to have traded fuel efficiency for road wear.

TheCatWoman said:

redesign road tax so as heavier vehicles pay more?

I like this idea. And SUV's ought to pay more. So too, the army  for vehicles brought onto public roads. This would eventually come out in higher taxes for us, but at least be better distributed. Trundling heavy vehicles like theirs creates far more damage to roads than domestic cars. 

I did suggest to DoE that the Royal Engineers Corps might be deployed to repair roads, because they would do it properly, army style. Didn't get a response so I might try again.

Round here it's tractors on the roads, they're huge things that barely fit on some of the smaller lanes, they crush the edges of the roads so everything starts crumbling.

Round here it's tractors on the roads, they're huge things that barely fit on some of the smaller lanes, they crush the edges of the roads so everything starts crumbling.