CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
“Tories launch new campaign to tackle Edinburgh pothole calamity”
(7 posts)-
Posted 5 years ago #
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I really hope that it was an excitable sub-editor who used the word "calamity" and not the Tories.
One question: where do they propose getting the money from? What's getting cut to find it?
Posted 5 years ago # -
Magic Money Tree.
Posted 5 years ago # -
(Or the Trunk Road Budget.)
Posted 5 years ago # -
Cycling budget, obvs. A Tory amendment to the recent CEC budget motion proposed exactly that. Voted down of course.
This is just PR, they senses the coalition is weak and they want to get cheesed off motorists to vote Tory next time.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Lets see - figures for the number of potholes based on "research" by a price comparison site.
A claim that "Almost a quarter of a million pounds has been wasted on compensation arising as a result of potholes in Edinburgh over the last ten years, money which should have been invested in maintaining roads in the first place.”
Or to put it another way £24,100 per year in compensation - assuming an average small pothole repair costs around £50 (482 small potholes filled in a year) I imagine that is quite good value compared to actually filling more potholes.
Then a proposal for £20m extra a year to fill potholes across Scotland. However, Audit Scotland highlights that "...overall council expenditure on roads maintenance continues to decrease, from £302 million in 2011/12 to £259 million in 2014/15 (14 per cent). Overall, councils spent £33 million (13 per cent) less on planned and routine maintenance in 2014/15 than the Society of Chief Officers of Transportation Scotland considers was necessary to maintain the current condition of local roads."
So the £20m fund doesn't even get road maintenance budgets back to where they were before austerity measures introduced by the Tories led to them being cut. Also, it isn't even enough to keep the roads from deteriorating further.
I suppose they have to keep some money back for Miles Briggs' plans to turn the bypass into the M25
Details: https://www.confused.com/press/releases/2017/the-true-depth-of-the-UKs-pothole-problem-revealed
http://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/uploads/images/report/nr_160804_maintaining_roads.png
Posted 5 years ago # -
I spent around half an hour last night with some other sustainable transport advocates discussing what problems Edinburgh needs to fix transport-wise.
It was only when I was cycling home that I realised nobody had mentioned potholes. I don't mean to suggest that they aren't a serious problem, but they clearly ranked well below dangerous motorists and parked cars in our discussion.
Posted 5 years ago #
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