Petition against surface dressing gets 10,000+ signatures

The road I commute on by car & cycle has been surface dressed 3 times now. Not once has it been done to any form of competence, nor does it get regular sweeps. What we do get is two well worn - smooth! - grooves on each side of the carriageway and a small mountain of stones elsewhere, usually most prominent at the kerbside. Which is nice.
Oddly enough the council never seem remotely interested.

Surface dressings are positively a hazard to all that ride and drive and to those that are in the vicinity of the chippings get thrown up.
They are a threat to the eyes of cyclists and cause paintwork damage.
They are a common cause of windscreen damage on both road vehicles and motorcycles and damaged paint finishes on cars and motor cycles.
The can & do cause damage to motorcyclists eyes,faces and to the visors on helmets.
They are also a potential source of loss of traction in country/rural lanes and when built up to mounds on bends they can be a source of total loss of traction and sliding.
The days of machine-brushing the surface to reduce the left-overs to a minimum are long-gone and of course it is not the local authority or the contractor that picks up the bill for the resultant damages.

I cycle along a surfaced dressed hill on my commute throught the country lanes. It's steep, feels safe (not for the first couple of weeks) and is much better than most of the roads I ride that are full of pot holes???

Edinburgh council last year and said they were going to widen their program of surface dressing. Not because they thought it would do any good, but because it gave a high level of "perceived" good. That is, it makes roads look a bit nicer and therefore people (i.e. voters) get the impression that something worthwhile is actually being done.

Translation: we know it's a waste of money, but we're going to do it anyway because we think most of you are idiots.

Unfortunately I can't find the article containing the quote from the council bigwig in charge of transport at the time.

A mix of tar and stone chips spread across the road -- luxury! Here (in Ontario, Canada) we deal with 3 types of "fixes".

For potholed roads they send a pick up truck full of asphalt patch down the road and the operators randomly throw shovel fulls into the holes and hope it gets packed in by cars before it breaks up and has to be redone. (Note: they are paid by the truckload so workmanship is not a prime concern.) I hit a fresh patch earlier this year, flipped the bike and fractured 5 ribs and collapsed a lung.

If the road has cracks, they inject a tar like substance that goes soft when the temperature rises. It nicely hides the crack so you aren't sure if your tire will sink into it. Avoiding these while being buzzed is hard on the chamois

If it is a gravel/dirt road they either re-grade it or lay a couple of inches of stone. Either way it takes a few months for cars to pack down a riding lane.

On a long ride today, over many roads that were once surface-dressed which have now settled into very rough roads on which to cycle (hate them!!!), got me thinking: Surely the increased friction caused by the rough surface will increase the fuel consumption and emissions of cars, which goes against the government's stated aim of reducing CO2 emissions!

its all very well saying just avoid the roads that have been done for a bit, but the councils usually start covering all the roads in the same area, and eventually you end up pushed out towards roads that maybe busier or more dangerous to cycle on.

whilst I dont have an issue with the surfacing if its done properly, for whatever reason it very rarely seems to be done properly thesedays, one of the roads I used regularly had it done recently, none of the holes or gaps in the road surface were fixed before they dumped all the gravel on it, 6 weeks later part of the gravel has worn away either back to the original surface or leaving shiny tarmac instead, the gutters are still full of loose chipings like some bad Ground force gravel bed makeover. and its made the junctions treacherous

Maybe if we put more freight onto rail and if fewer people chose these vanity 4x4 vehicles the roads would not fall into such disrepair in the first place.

Awful to ride on. No they rarely get swept after being laid. I fear about falling off on one and ripping my flesh to pieces.

Short n sweet comment! Hint.

I’ve just signed the petition. Having said that, I think that a more realistic goal might be to reduce the amount this dodgy treatment gets used and reduce the amount of times it’s done in a dodgy way.

A road dressing in my home town of Liphook (Hants) went badly wrong a couple of years ago and the mess is still with us http://www.liphook.uk/?section=interactive&page=talkback_thread_wide&id=...

It was done in hot weather and the chippings failed to set. It then rained heavily for a couple of days. The result was clouds of dust, stretches of bare tar a mile long, massive new potholes and lines of chippings a foot high still present two weeks after the work. The roads were not only unrideable by bicycles – I couldn’t even ride them safely on a motorbike. Huge efforts were made to get the chippings back up, but they simply couldn’t hoover up that volume of stones.

The other specific practice that has to go is the 10 or 20mph 'speed limits'. This is completely cynical as it is a pure ‘cover-your arse’ for the local authority/contractors. I remember coming across a 10 mile stretch of the A272 in Hampshire that had been 'dressed'. Normally a 10 minute drive, this would be have been an hour for anyone sticking to the speed limit. The road wasn’t busy, no-one kept to the limit and I’m sure the contractor didn’t really consider anyone would. A broken windscreen for a motorist can be shrugged off: 'We put the signs up - we're covered'. But a 70mph stone in the face for a cyclist?

I’m not saying drive as fast as you like on the chippings – I’m saying the contractors must finish the job and open the road in a fit state.

So what I would be looking for is some government enforced guidelines about when dressing can be done, how it should be done (fix the underlying road surface/potholes etc. first) and how and when the job should be considered finished (by the contractors - not local car drivers).

Finally, although in support of the ‘don’t do it at all argument’ – when did you encounter this treatment in a country with ‘proper’ roads like say Germany?