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Panorama
The Pothole Problem
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002nc89/panorama-the-pothole-problem
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Infrastructure
Potholes (and roadworks)
(203 posts)-
Posted 5 months ago #
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There are some very unpleasant holes on the eastbound side of Seafield Road, around the end of Seafield Street, which are large enough to damage important and expensive motor cars. They've been directly reported to the council and FixMyStreeted but don't seem to have been investigated yet, unlike the Facebook-famous banging manhole cover on Duke St.
Posted 5 months ago # -
There's an absolute (rim) cracker of a pothole on Slateford Rd opposite St Michael's church at the bus stop.
A good 6" deep, nice sharp edges, and a foot or so wide. It's fun watching the buses even trying to avoid it
Posted 5 months ago # -
Currently, the resurfacing of Home St / Gilmore Place / Kings Theatre, Dalry area, and QR9 / Balgreen, is being carried out with only minor active travel improvements e.g. ramped tables.
I can't help feeling that Jenkinson only cares about resurfacing the roads and is only throwing in some "easy" active travel token gestures, instead of implementing the full schemes proposed for these areas.
I wonder how much of the active travel budget is now being spent on resurfacing?
Posted 5 months ago # -
Not to be contrary, but I'd imagine in the case of the adhesive curbs to be used on Home St that road resurfacing is a prerequisite - solving for current potholes and surface issues in the cycle lane before it's installed there. The current works, to my understanding, are very much about making sure that as the King's refurb ties up that the major works are done around there before it reopening and are all being done with the Meadows to Union Canal route in mind.
Posted 5 months ago # -
The cost, and officer time, of adding the bus-gate on Dalry Rd at Haymarket would be insignificant compared to the resurfacing costs. Same for installing the one-way sections on QR9 and associated cycle bypasses. And the Dalry bus-gate *is fundamental* to reducing traffic in the area and allowing the continuous-footways to work (Continuous-footway doesn't work if there is too much car traffic crossing it)
So why haven't they done that?
Will they just conveniently forget about it later, like they do everything else?
I mean it's not like we've been waiting 5 years for a permanent scheme outside Gillespie's primary school or anything...
Posted 5 months ago # -
They've just done two more streets in the estate around Nether Currie primary, the school still doesn't have even the rudimentary safety infrastructure that has been in at Bonaly or Firhill for 10+ years... and they shut Riccarton Mains Rd for eight weeks for a full resurface, again leaving the ~2 foot wide footway that could be the basis of a busy active travel route to Heriot Watt with zero improvement.
There's no real interest in active travel - just the occasional big investment somewhere that motorists won't notice or complain about, and then endless replanning exercises to distract the activists.
Posted 5 months ago # -
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Highways to Hell
Alex Forsyth emerges from traffic jam Britain to ask why roadworks cause so many of us so much disruption. Are there better ways to manage the necessary maintenance of our roads?
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Posted 4 months ago # -
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It is confirmation of what every driver will suspect as they venture through the minefield of Scotland’s potholes - the country’s roads have got worse, and for the second year in a row.
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This is news??
Posted 2 months ago # -
Strangely correlated with he year on year increase in the size and weight of single occupant motor vehicles. Have you seen the size of SUVs? Huger and huger BUT see also Tractors. You could fit six wee Massey Fergusons into a modern day tractor
Posted 2 months ago # -
Nononono @gembo Cllr Whyte has very clearly explained everything is the fault of bike lanes. Come on now
Posted 2 months ago # -
Labour candidate for NE Fife was asked where they'd take the money from for the pothole fund, she said "It will be repurposed from the active and sustainable transport budget.". Good to know.
Posted 2 months ago # -
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Stella Johnston, 23, opened Stellar & Co in October 2023. She said the cost was huge as a small business owner and is worried about the impact on her customers, some of whom travel from West Lothian and Midlothian to see her.
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All about personal priorities and unrealistic expectations.
Money for fuel and fancy(?) haircuts but not for road use/parking.
Bring on universal road pricing.
Posted 2 months ago # -
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Drivers who choose SUVs are compounding the pothole problem, experts have warned, as research showed hundreds of thousands of people bought bigger cars to navigate damaged roads.
Scientists said the cumulative effect of increasing numbers of heavier vehicles was a contributory factor in Britain’s potholes getting worse.
SUVs made up more than half of the 2m new cars sold in the UK last year, and a smaller but growing proportion of the 7m secondhand cars sold.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/11/suv-britain-potholes-worse-scientists-heavier-cars
In short
Experts confirm the obvious
Any politician ‘promising’ to ‘fix the potholes’ is deluded
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Anas Sarwar said Labour will set up a fund to fix one million potholes a year.
The Scottish Labour leader said his party would establish a £350m pothole fund to spend £70m a year repairing potholes.
He said the cash would be “repurposed” from the active and sustainable travel budget and said the plan also includes greater preventative maintenance to improve the condition of roads in the long term.
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https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/25918709.anas-sarwar-reveals-plan-pothole-fund-fix-5m-holes/
Posted 1 month ago # -
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Britain’s bridges are crumbling. It’s a £5bn race to fix them
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/07/albert-bridge-london-crisis-facing-britains-bridges/
P.s.
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High Speed 2 (HS2) services are now anticipated to start in 2036 at the earliest, with 2039 looking more likely, while the estimated final cost is heading over £100bn.
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Posted 1 month ago # -
"He said the cash would be “repurposed” from the active and sustainable travel budget and said the plan also includes greater preventative maintenance to improve the condition of roads in the long term."
Nothing says preventative maintenance more than installing modal filters.
Posted 1 month ago # -
Sarwar mentions this, and the problem of "spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on cycle lanes that could cost much less than they need to cost" in an interview here, when asked what his most unpopular political opinion is: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002t1cw
Posted 1 month ago # -
All while not forgetting that segregated cycle lanes are *car infrastructure*. Get rid of (most of) the cars, and they won't be needed!
Posted 1 month ago # -
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Reform UK’s leading figures have repeatedly promoted a new pothole-fixing machine by the construction company JCB, while the party received £200,000 from the British digger maker, the Guardian can reveal.
Several Reform politicians including Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson, Robert Jenrick, Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice have sung the praises of the JCB PotHole Pro machine.
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Posted 2 weeks ago # -
The resurfacing and the JCB gizmo are basically crap - they fail to deal with the underlying structural issues in the road base by only papering over the cracks
I'll get back to this later
https://www.flickr.com/photos/h52/55232011406/in/datetaken/
TARMAC DOES NOT STICK TO STEEL
anywhere as demonstrated throughout the city especially with the tram tracks
This is from some 40 years of building pavements & doing the revision of the 1870 Tramways Act in 1999 (which Edinburgh Trams ignored when building Phase 1
I also worked to deliver a pilot trial of VeloSTRAIL on the private railway at Aiskew LC near Bedale on A684 where a cyclist died after fall in early 2007 and this system has now been fitted to Garve LC on A835 (part of NC500 route)
Happy to deliver a narrative on my images of the tram tracks being built between Haymarket and Waverley bridge and still with the top slab breaking up at every load transfer joint for whole distance HYM to EDB!
Posted 1 week ago # -
“The resurfacing and the JCB gizmo are basically crap - they fail to deal with the underlying structural issues in the road base by only papering over the cracks“
Yep
I wonder if SA is still an evangelist
Did the machine he borrowed do anything when there were no cameras around??
Any politician (there seem to be a lot of them around just now…) who says they’ll ’fix the potholes’ is deluded and stupid or (knowingly) lying.
Posted 1 week ago # -
Speaking of resurfacing, I received a letter from CEC the other day notifying me that "carriageway surface treatment works" are soon to start in this area. Again. IIRC this job was last done at around the same time that the Lanark Road 'resurfacing' was dragging on, i.e. some time in 2024 - so only two years ago - by the same contractors who did it the time before that. On both occasions the 'new' surface started to deteriorate pretty quickly, with piles of loose gravel collecting in the gutters and at junctions, and longitudinal seams re-appearing, to the peril of riders of single-track vehicles. I think the contractors to whom this job has been allocated are the same ones as before, so I can only assume that the result will be just as unsatisfactory as before.
Of course it doesn't help that this neighbourhood is sadly an all too popular rat run for impatient drivists who can't be bothered to wait to turn right at the Fairmilehead lights, and who ignore the 20mph speed limit and cut across junctions egregiously in their eagerness to reach the suburban paradise of Oxgangs Road. Find a way to get the numbers of rat-runners down and the rate of wear on the road surface would likely drop noticeably.
Posted 1 week ago #
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