Unreliable Sauce

roadS To ruiN

Long, long ago in what now feels like a land far, far away I wrote a column for Bike magazine advocating trail bikes as the optimum urban transport. As were most of my oh-so wittily entitled Running Out Of Road columns back in the ‘70s, it was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek exhortation bemoaning that our city streets were pockmarked with potholes, puddles and sunken manholes that made progress on the sports bikes of the time a distinctly hazardous business.

The point was of course that with their longer travel suspension and wire-spoked wheels, if you were riding a trailie through town at a decent clip you stood a better chance of not being spat off or cracking the base of your spine than on, say, a Honda CB750. But in those days trail bikes – and there weren’t too many of them – had little more progressive suspension movement than today’s run-of-the-mill middleweights and scooters which we supposedly regard as commuters. Fast forward five decades and at least judging by central London’s parking bays, trailies are positively commonplace amongst urban riders, underlining the sorry fact that the physical state of our roads hasn’t changed much since then.

And what a sorry state of affairs it is that they’re still in such a sorry state. In fact I’d claim that if anything our roads are in a dangerous physical state, and not just in heavily-trafficked towns and cities where thanks to rogue utility companies and crumbling drainage systems, road works tend to be more frequent. Here in the Welsh Marches, for cash-strapped county councils road maintenance has become a lower priority just as education and healthcare have perforce become higher ones. I frequently have to make a round trip of just 16 miles to the next town along a B-road which would disgrace many developing countries thanks to literally hundreds of potholes, deep linear crevices and sunken or raised drain covers.

Taking this up with the relevant council, I was referred to its Highway Maintenance Plan, which proved similar to those of other local councils, a dense, 70-page document full of reassuring intentions, e.g. to set out a ‘reasonable system of inspection and repair… to ensure that it meets its duty to maintain all publiclymaintainable highways for which the Council is the highway authority.’

However those undertakings plainly aren’t being executed in practice and when duly approached, the three councils that border our little town all refused to comment other than to re-direct me to the commercial companies they’ve charged with responsibility for maintenance and repair who so far have refused to comment. Anecdotally, and evidentially, these companies prefer to simply occasionally re-surface a few hundred yards of easily treatable, not necessarily badly pot-holed tarmac rather than individually repair thousands of holes.

Sometimes as a meaningless sop to outraged council tax payers a contractor will spray white paint around a particularly bad pothole that’s been reported to them by one means or another, but often no further action is taken and the damage worsens, or the hole will eventually be filled in but usually in a cheap, makeshift fashion that doesn’t stand the test of time. But equally infuriating is the fact that the repairer will ignore many other, equally damaging or dangerous holes in the immediate vicinity simply because they don’t have a ring of white paint around them!

Suitably angered by such ravaged road surfaces and having had little joy from local councils, I’ve contacted FixMyStreet (www. fixmystreet.com) – often attaching photos of the worst offenders – who offer a simple reporting procedure which is communicated with the relevant council. And in association with FixMyStreet, the RAC (www.rac.co.uk) also provides such a service and offers help claiming against councils for vehicle damage – currently running at over £17 million nationwide!

So I’m lucky not to’ve come a cropper nor damaged the road bikes I now ride along the Queen’s knackered highways. But both I and two of my immediate neighbours have suffered broken suspensions in the cars we drive hereabouts which at several hundred quid a pop to repair is pretty outrageous and potentially lethal. So I shall carry on reporting and complaining more and more vociferously, although I seriously fear that until people start getting killed or suing them for suspension repairs, local governments won’t take a blind bit of notice. And in the meantime, it’s probably time to get another trail bike.

Check out Williams’ archived rantings at www.runningoutofroad.uk