dabiscuit

Moan time.

I live in Bedfordshire and can only assume the council for transport are idiots.

A lot of the roads near where I live have recently been resurfaced. There a big signs that say "road improvement works".

B0ll0cks.

I'm not 100% certain how the work is done, but it looks like they cover the road in glue then spread billions of stones over it then leave it for a few weeks for cars to drive over until the lose stones have gone. Then they wait another month to put lines down.

It's cheap it's nasty and the road noise is awful. The worst part by far is the 20mph limit. Ok so most drive above it but the ***** that drive faster than you overtake showering your car in lose stones. So now I go the long way around!

I'm seriously considering getting the council to pay for a new paint job.

Tidgy

dont forget bits of tar stuck all over your car

dabiscuit

There isn't any. I don't know what they do but its not resurfacing as we not it Jim.

To be fair pot holes have gone

Don Clark

Surface Dressing............

http://www.highwaysmaintenance.com/sdpics.htm

dabiscuit

Don, trust you to know! The oracle strikes again

53

iTrader: (41)

Yep being done round here ruining all the routes I like to hoon

dabiscuit

"You might find it strange to hear that I like the process of surface dressing".

Never have truer words been spoken.

jazzyjembreaze

iTrader: (11)

It's all across the country at the mo
" part of the pinch point govement road bill of 2012
Yes , 2012 ****'D up Britain again
Local council's will loose the money if not
Repaired , upgraded , or renewed by September .
So they are all at it at the mo , country wide

Richy P1984

It's cheap and it's quick, and ideal for roads with a 30mph. Yes you will have to drive at 20mph whilst everything 'settles' but would you rather them use a significantly larger portion of the budget for a complete re-surface, and have other areas go without?

LuckyWelshchap

OP's incorrrectly titled the thread imo -should be 'Road resurfacing DOESN'T work '

Been doing it around here for 3-4 years.
It doesn't matter if everyone drove at 1 mph. All you need is the correct set of circumstances for a tyre to connect with a loose chipping thats tight against another with the right angle to be used as a launch pad and it's like squeezing pips. The mini-exocet still hits your car at dozens of mph.

I'd like to see someone take on a council.
It has to be a danger but given the consequences of losing the case it would cost millions to sue probably.

Oh, and experience says that the resurfaced road wears down very quickly.
Our street was nice and shiny just 4 months after resurfacing doesn't works.

And, as a bonus, where do you think all the surplus chippings end up - yes, down the gulleys, causing them to overflow with far less rainfall than ever before.

Road resurfacing works - as a cash cow for road resurfacing companies.

FuZzBoM

I may have a different point of view to you guys because I also ride a motorbike on a regular basis. Let me tell you this stuff is lethal on a bike! Was recently in Yorkshire doing some touring, leant over mid corner to find it covered in gravel on the exit. Signs at end of corner to tell me so.... Nice huh. very nearly ended up on my backside. No skill involved just pure luck.

As such I implore you to sign the on-line petition
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/67408

Cheers,
Fuzz

Slev

I live in Redditch Worcestershire and half the town has been resurfaced with this ****e! Even the 70 mph duel carriageway which is a joke when some idiot comes flying past showering you! I'm forever moaning at the moment because half the town is now covered in this gravel ****e!!! I only said to my wife the other day how lethal this must be for bikers! So to some it up, we pay thousands in taxes from both our wages and road tax only to be hit with further bills for bodywork repair or alloy wheel repair! Ahhhhhhh rant over,!!

Matt_STi

I work for West Sussex County Council and most of my mates from work, work in the carriageway and footway resurfacing team. To surface dress a road is a hell of a lot cheaper than laying brand new asphalt down.

Granted it's noisy, granted it's not as stable if on a bike, granted it's not as nice as a full carriageway reconstruction. However, if nothing was done, I'm sure most people would moan that nothing is getting done and our roads are awful.

Obviously you're bound to get the typical idiot to thrash up and down the roads and not care about stone chips flying around, but on the whole, surface dressing serves a great purpose.

Once bedded in, the road will be smoother and hopefully (if done correctly) will remove any potholes and the main factor with surface dressing, it creates a better braking surface.

Ukneil21

My street got done last year and so far everyday when the weathers hot i get home from work to find hundreds of little stones melted into my tyres. Can i complain about this? Will i get anywhere? Wouldnt mind but when im paying £150 a tyre i dont want to be shelling out on 4 more sometime soon

craigybaby

iTrader: (8)

As slev said they have resurfaced the roads round here biggest headache ever the day I brought my car they were resurfacing a road they had done the left and right of the road but hadn't done the middle it was one way traffic so I thought hmm I would drive down the middle to avoid it WHAT A MISTAKE! what I didn't see was the tar on the edge of each side this resulted in me getting tar Absoloutely plastered all over my car the arches were literally dripping with tar when I got back needless to say I was Absoloutely fuming it took me 2 hours and 3 litres of tardis to get it off lol

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Please, I implore you, if "not as stable" is how you'd truly describe what a newly dressed surface is like for a motorbike, then try riding one.

People who don't ride rarely appreciate just how different a bike is to a car. A car has four wheels and doesn't just fall over if one of them loses traction for a moment, but the same can't be said of a bike. Loose gravel is like riding over ball bearings, and if the front wheel slips, then it's game over. Doubly so if there's some idiot in a car right behind you, frustrated at being stuck behind a 'bloody biker' doing 15mph for 'no reason'.

FuZzBoM

That comment made me laugh as well.. It may well be a cheap method of fixing a road but even at low speeds the bike moves all over the place on the stuff.
As AndyC points out it truly is like trying to ride on ball bearings.

There must be some other method to lay this stuff?! Use something like a tarmac roller to push it home and then brush off the excess maybe?

Matt_STi

I've never ridden a motorbike so I don't know what its like to ride on a smooth surface to a surface dressed road. However, I presumed it would be not as stable. I wasn't expecting a biker gang to pick up on my wording!
I was only trying to explain that its a cheaper alternative which means more roads can be resurfaced. There is always plenty of notice and there will always be diversion routes so you don't have to ride down those roads. (in West Sussex anyway)

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

The dangerous time is the couple of weeks between the loose stones being left on the road, and the time when most of them have been either compressed into the road surface or finally swept away - and believe me, there's no subtlety to it.

If you've not ridden on a road that's been left in this condition, then you really, really need to. I promise that your view will change completely.

JDM_Stig

iTrader: (3)

I understand where you are coming from but how does a 10mm layer of tar and chipping do that ?
They dont repair the pot holes properly and they just break up,

They recently did a road not far from me and within 11 days they have marked it up for 1 of the services to dig it up,
so where was the "planning" here ?

recent thread on BCF mentioned the dangers, blocked drains etc that comes from this 2 or 3 week "improvement", as that`s all it lasts if we are lucky.

LuckyWelshchap

And a lot more expensive to every motorist who has to have all the chips repaired before selling on. Caerphilly Council's muppets (for they are - instead of warning motorists and we could have taken a detour they put the signs up 100yds down a road, past a bend. Once on there you can't get off and have to run the gauntlet. Lords knows how much it will cost me)

Is the risk of one life worth it ? (See a previous post)

You also haven't mentioned potholes.

Anyway, note I said the road resurfacing companies.
I appreciate that "time's is 'ard" but this is a very narrow market. It's not like the petrol company cartel whose customers MUST have their product, so demand keeps the price up.
There's a very small amount of customers for roadworks, and those should be standing together to drive prices down.

Our council puts up with any crap from contractors.
Just had a 30-WEEK closure (now into week 32) where the contractors never turned up for the first 8.

Anyway, back on topic - has anyone (Lord forbid), pedestrians especially, been injured as a result of this practice?
Bet someone has somewhere.

f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

Move to Lancashire, they don't do anything with the roads here or much else for that matter.

Councils are generally the most inefficient and poorly run organisations in the country. The amount of money they waste on stupid schemes and needless red tape would probably pay for the whole country's roads to be properly relaid from top to bottom.

Just read the minutes of any council meeting to see the way these people could make something like making a cup of tea a long drawn out, costly and tedious operation. Lots of jobsworths and people with a jumped up sense of their own importance from the leaders right down to the so called locally elected councillors.

Remove that culture and there would be some money to sort things like the roads out properly, but it will never happen while the gravy train keeps rolling along for them.

Easy spending someone else's money isn't it?

FuZzBoM

I shall elaborate on my near miss.. As I say was banked over mid corner (left hand corner) to see signs on exit of said corner saying 'loose chippings' back end went out rather badly. Ended up sitting the bike upright best I could on the wrong side of the road. Luckily oncoming traffic was going rather slowly due to the gravel.
Granted this was due to poor signage as well as the gravel.

Before you start saying I was going too fast etc. I was doing no more than 45-50mph on a 60mph road. I was touring and seeing the sights not racing..
it was a very brown trouser moment I can tell you.

I wasn't hurt I know but I do still wonder if anyone had come off before or after my incident.

Carnut

This would actually help drainage.

The council do this for two reasons, firstly it's a cheaper option that allows them to service more roads and secondly it time constraints.

The council's like to put there money to one side for a rainy day then before they get their new check from the government they spend like crazy to get the full amount rather than just a top up.

p.s I have fallen off a motorbike due to loose chippings, that and a lack of ability before anyone else says it.

If a individual council has a budget of, for arguments sake 1 billion pound, by the end of the year if they have only spent half they will just get topped up, if they spend all of it then they will get the full amount.

LuckyWelshchap

Can't see how blocking half of the gulley channel with chippings helps but then I'm not a highways engineer.

However, I have had the misfortune () to be a councillor.

The comment about budgets isn't quite right. It's use it or lose it. That's why lots of work seems to get done around March/April time. (Councils can spend March's money in April provided they ringfence it to a contract awarded and started).
The big question (which in my experience almost never gets asked) is value for money. It's my main complaint about the subject of this thread.

Easy to say value for money = getting an adequate job done at less cost but how many councils/councillors also add the disruption to lives factor in?
The 30-week job I mentioned earlier has caused a huge amount of traffic congestion. benefit to the public? - nil. It's for a 'feature' (aka some arty-farty work) to be erected. Not a new toliet block, health centre or whatever, so there's no upside to it.

This surface dressing - is it really worth it for the public?
Ask people if they want this, or a complete resurface at lesser intervals?

Unfortunately councillors aren't professionals (at a lot of things councils do) and so can't question 'the professionals' when an officer stands there in committee and says 'there's a far better and more cost-effective technique we're going to use for road resurfacing'.
Most of our speed bumps around here are way outside of DoT's criteria - any councillors 'qualified' to say so?

Depends I suppose on anyone's idea of 'better'.
Is it money going farther, the job being done faster, more often, or what ?

My view is this:

Better for the public, road users.

Certainly not cheaper, and probably not cost-effective (in the 'standard' meaning of the term).
A way that doesn't endanger lives, and doesn't cost road users a fortune in stonechip repairs and windscreen replacement.

Councils saving money in this way are costing the public.
That's the same public who pay their taxes partly in order that the councils can maintain the roads.

Only in the UK could this happen.

Carnut

Going off topic again, sorry op but any gardener or farmer will tell you that gravel or stones help drainage.

Plus the information i gave is 100% fact, it came straight from a taxi driver.

LuckyWelshchap

That's because it allows water to flow between the chippings because it's far less dense than earth etc.
Stating the obvious water has more ways of passing through and encounters less resistance.

However, that doesn't apply to a road gulley which in normal circumstances has a great big open outlet for the water to run through, an outlet which is probably more than 80% blocked if stone chips are piled up in front of it.

Not being facetious at all (and not wishing to appear so) but pour a couple of bags of chippings down a roadside drain and watch what happens when the rains come:

1. That drain soon overflows - can't even take the flow of water;
2. Drains up the run start to overflow - the backflow of water caused by the obstruction reaches them one-by-one.
3. Drains down the run perform as they should - but that produces suction because nothings coming down to take the place of the air etc. that's being dragged out by the force of water.
4. The stone chips start getting dragged and sucked down the line, and lie there after the strom has gone.
5. These become obstructions, catching small pieces of debris and eventually forming large barriers, similar to branches, trees etc. stick on a bridge in a surging river.
6. The entire gulley run needs maintenance.

Where do the council get the money from for this unplanned work?
Yes, savings made from elsewhere within the Highways Budget.

And yes, quite possibly from savings made as the result of using 'modern, more cost-effective techniques for road resurfacing'.

Matt_STi

If done correctly, they should pre surface dress - which is where they fill the potholes one week, then go back and surface dress the next week. That how it works here anyway.

I don't know where you live nor how your local authority plan their works, clearly it sounds like they don't, or an emergency to open the road back open again such as a gas leak.

LuckyWelshchap

I think you've hit a nail on the head here.

I'm primarily targetting the contractors (tho' imo the councils/councillors should be on top of them to make sure its done right).
It seems to me that all this is being done in order to save time and money, and cutting corners is often seen as a way of doing that.
I'd make a lot more money doing 10 miles of road/week than 5.

Why don't they sweep up and recover all the loose chippings? Surely it would be cost-effective?????
When the roads (and public) are subjected to this around here there must be literally TONS of chippings looking for a good home.
How much is in one of those (looks like a cubic metre) bags?

Carnut

I agree with what f1_fan said before about Lancashire but where do you live LuckyWelshchap, a sack full of stone chippings and trees getting stuck down the drain.