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Pothole in Didcot, Oxfordshire (credit - Tim Masters)Pothole “so deep I can park my bike in it” branded a “danger to life” by cyclist
A cyclist has blasted the “atrocious” state of the roads near his home in Oxfordshire, which he says represent a “potential danger to life”, a week after an 84-year-old was killed after the front wheel of his bike became lodged in a nine-inch-deep crack in the road surface in Lancashire.
Cyclist Tim Masters, from Didcot, has written to Oxfordshire County Council this week to report several potholes in the area, including one he says is “so deep I can park my bike in it”.
“The state of the roads around the Hagbournes near Didcot is atrocious,” Masters told the Oxford Mail. “I’m a cyclist and motorist. I use these roads almost every day.
“The most serious pothole is on Brook Lane, close to the junction with Park Road and Main Road in Coscote. The pothole is so deep I can park my bike in it. In my opinion this pothole is a potential danger to life.”
This #pothole between East and West Hagbourne is so deep I can park my bike in it #potholes #OXFORDSHIRE @mrpotholeuk pic.twitter.com/Vt0Yzk9Mzb
— Tim Masters (@ManGrandCircle) January 9, 2023
Since alerting the local authority about the staggeringly large pothole on Brook Lane earlier this week, the cyclist tweeted yesterday that Oxfordshire County Council had fixed the hazard within 48 hours of his complaint.
> Dangerous pothole that caused fatal cycling crash was reported multiple times without action
However, Masters notes that more needs to be done to ensure the safety of cyclists in the surrounding area.
“The stretch of Park Road surrounded by open fields between Didcot and the Hagbournes is in a disgraceful state, especially for cyclists,” he says.
“Many sections at the side the road have collapsed and are unusable. There are dangerous potholes and dips along the whole stretch.
“The road quality has seriously worsened since it has become a main route to and from East Hagbourne used by construction vehicles for the new Deanfield Green development.”
Responding to Mr Masters’ warnings about the state of local roads, Liberal Democrat councillor Andrew Gant, who serves as the council’s cabinet member for highway management as well as its ‘cycling champion’, told BBC Radio that the local authority understands the safety concerns of cyclists and other road users.
However, he noted that “budget pressures” due to inflation and the recent “severe weather” have combined to “make the situation on the roads worse”.
The complaints about the dire state of Oxfordshire’s roads come just over a week after the death of 84-year-old retired music teacher, cycling club president, and father-of-three Harry Colledge, who was killed while riding his bike on a rural road near the Lancashire village of Winmarleigh after his front wheel got stuck in a deep crack in the road.
On Sunday, we reported that the late cyclist’s wife, Valerie Colledge, has called on both central and local governments to do more to protect people cycling on the UK’s “woefully inadequate” rural roads.
“Potholes are a horrendous problem for cyclists,” Mrs Colledge said. “Harry’s front wheel got stuck in a nine-inch-deep pothole. A local farmer told me she had complained to the council about the pothole, but nothing was done.
“Roads here are in a terrible condition. The lane where Harry died is used by heavy milk trucks, tractors, and lorries, so often subsides.”
According to recent data from the Department for Transport, at least 425 cyclists have been killed or injured due to poor or defective road surfaces since 2016.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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33 comments
I hit a double pothole like this, punctured both wheels and went over the bars. But when I tried to recover the cost of all the damage to me and the bike I was unsecceful because it was 1 week before the annual inspection period expired as their policy and so it was deemed as not their fault!
Councils need to step up their game and improve dangerous potholes not just for cyclist but other road users. We have worse roads now than some so called third world countries!
As I was cycling in this morning, I noticed that a highways truck was parked up and they'd put cones around a pair of smallish but very deep potholes which have recently opened up.
I stopped and asked whether they'd also be fixing the even larger and deeper pothole twenty feet away (and actually closer to where they'd parked their van), as it didn't have cones around it. The reply: "No, mate - we've just been told to do those ones. You know what they're like: we'll probably come back in a couple of weeks to do that one...".
Would it be too much to ask them to use their initiative and do the other potholes as well? They could even contact their manager and get his permission.
That was my first thought too, but then I thought that I wouldn't want to do their job so lets both grumble about the council managers instead... I intend to go by there on my way home and see if there was an outbreak of common sense
There was no outbreak. The two they'd been sent for have been filled and patched, but the other one is still there
I think the repairs are normally carried out by contractors (not Council employees) so they will fill the holes they've been contracted to fill. So it's not as simple as getting permission from their manager.
Filling in a hole without a job ticket will result in no payment for the job so they would get a bollocking instead.
My wife works in finance for a large contractor:
Did you get the client's permission before you ordered those parts and undertook the work ?
Umm..no
How am I going to get the money off the client then when they haven't agreed ?
This the down side of contractors. When it was a DLO all these things would be done with initiative. But Thatcher put a stop to that.
What was introduced was to make councils' DLOs achieve a return on investment that was unrealistic so they could not tender for future work and stopped existing.
Exactly this. They are about to tar and chip the road outside mine. The council have been along and randomly drawn around and numbered the repairs they want done before they chip the surface. I say random since they follow no logic. They haven't highlighted some of the deeper potholes, sunken manholes, some of the longest longitudinal cracks or some of the bits where the edge is falling away but they have highlighted a few minor blemishes that are minor in comparison. No doubt it will be a complete mess after a few months, just in time for it to be on the RideLondon route in May.
South Oxfordshire and west Berkshire roads must surely be among the worst in the UK.
As well as half-arsed repair work which barely lasts a year, its a busy area and the advent of mapping apps means that rural roads are being used much more by HGVs which damage the edges... only this morning was I forced off a small B road the road by a Polish HGV driver taking a short cut to avoid major roads.
Austerity is often blamed, but we pay so much tax (close to my heart having recently completed my self assessment)... what the hell to they do with all our money?
You appear to be unfamiliar with the sole principle of the tories; take money from the poor and give it to the rich. It is no coincidence that while us plebs have been suffering under austerity, there has been a surge in millionaires and billionaires.
I suspect that was a rhetorical question but the answers are out there. Most goes on the young, the sick, and - ever-increasingly - the old.
https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/what-does-government-spen...
You might think we pay lots of tax (maybe you do) but the UK's overall tax burden is relatively low compared to most European countries. Many of them will have better public services (and roads) though.
https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/how-do-uk-tax-revenues-co...
Well it's no wonder the NHS are stuck for funds now they have to fix potholes.
BTW Essex announced they will only fund half the pot hole work needed. They just put cones in the other half.
Hopefully they put it in the deepest bit to help.
Just like Rufford Ford, as was.
I think I see where Ford could usefully sponsor something.
This one seems a bit big for it, but for smaller ones and general road irregularities, Oxfordshire has the Dragon Patcher. Impressive machine, and the melted bitumen sticks the dressing to the tyres so it sounds like you are riding through rice crispies.
Cyclists! Been sold one of those fashionable (last week) gravel bikes and concerned you're not shredding to the max? Don't waste time and money driving to some "must do" route. Simply take a ride in your local town or city!
Without wishing to be overtly political again, this is politics. We've had austerity for 13 years, with public services cut to the bone, then cut again, and again and again. If your council has a choice between looking after deprived, hungry, homeless people and filling a hole in the road, they have to do the first. The problem is that the tories have starved local councils of funding, and forced them to contract out things like filling potholes, so the pothole gets filled in once, the contractor gets paid, but they've done such a bad job that it needs doing again a year later, so they fill it again and get paid again and so on ad infinitum. It's the more efficient private capital system way.
Then after so many people complain, the government announce a massive sum to take care of roads that is almost as much as 10% of the amount that has been cut over the past 12 years and almost enough to fill 10% of the potholes. Shame that cyclists and motorcyclists die, but hey, money is important.
The counter to that is that local roads round here (London) have been in a terrible state for 20 years or more. And despite all the talk of "austerity" the reality was a modest reduction to central government funding allocations to local councils.
The bigger issue is how councils choose to spend their money and whether they get good value for money.
There are many councils that have thrown hundreds of £millions at speculative property schemes - Croydon being the best case with close to £1B debt. Our local council made a song and dance about insourcing refuse collection to "save money" and then latterly admitted it hadn't budgeted for refuse vehicles - adding £17m to the actual cost and landing up with a service that was close to 20% more expensive to operate.
Likewise, some councils are far more proactive in checking the quality of road repairs they have commissioned - avoiding cost down the line. Some councils go even further - checking the quality of roadworks completed by utility companies and making them repeat the works if the work is poor - saving council tax payers from paying from repairs down the line.
In truth in most councils there are hundreds of examples of entirely avoidable waste that could increase the funding for road repairs.
Modest reduction? The figures are admittedly complicated by changes to business rates with offsetting grant reduction, schemes such as the New Homes Bonus that benefit rich areas at the expense of poorer ones and the split between ring fenced grant funding and core funding but the spending power* of local authorities reduced by over 25% between 2011 and 2018. I am not sure 25% is a modest reduction. This isn't a uniform cut, areas with higher deprivation tend to have lower proportions of their income generated from Council Tax and retained business rates by virtue of the fact that they are deprived. This means their overall funding is proportionally more dependent on falling Central Govt grants.
* Spending Power is Central Govt's preferred measure and includes all local government income including locally levied and retained Council Tax and business rates. If you use the non-ringfenced central govt grants as your preferred measure, this has fallen by considerably more - nearer to 50% over the same period. There are arguments for and against both measures.
Thank you for saving me the trouble of looking up the figures. I wonder if open_roads would still think that was a modest reduction if his income fell somewhere between 25/50% and his financial responsibilities increased.
Good observation.
My Council (Ashfield) is currently complaining iirc of an effective 14% reduction in one year. 2nd worst in the country, it is stated.
One little little-known cut which was smuggled in the budget small print was that LHA (aka Housing Benefit) has been frozen in cash terms again, which is a 10% Real Terms cut in rental support in real terms for tenants on benefits.
The overall reductions for LAs since 2010 are of the order of 40%, I think.
My response would be to introduce the Proportional Property Tax to replace Council Tax, which is basically a 0.5% annual levy on the value of the house - with balancing adjustments, and includes the abolition of Stamp Duty in the package. There would be a modest effect towards balancing out tax-promoted property price inflation.
I am not sure about taxing property values at current value. Old Mrs Wiggins who bought her 2 bed terrace in Leyton for £2000 in 1960 and gets by on a single old age pension of £10k isn't going to be fairly treated paying a tax of £4k per annum because it's value is now £800k through no fault of hers.
This is at the heart of an increasingly important - and tricky - issue. Not one I'm up for debating here but this article is useful.
www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/09/rising-asset-wealth-and-falling...
My experience across the UK is that London's roads are better than other cities. And while London councils have seen a modest reduction in central funding, many urban councils in poorer areas have been much harder hit.
www.localgov.co.uk/Englands-poorest-areas-hit-hardest-by-austerity/54120
I don't know about your local authority, but my London borough had it's central government stipend halved during the austerity years, and it's not been increased again since.
Up here in Dumfries and Galloway you'd be hard pressed to find a length of road without half a dozen holes like that
And then when you ride over the border into South Ayrshire they get worse!
the recent “severe weather”, I had a bet with myself that would be official council response. Its almost as predictable as if they didnt seal the fix properly, rather than just dump some vaguely warm tarmac in it, theyll be back next year to fix it again.
all we can do is keep reporting them when we see them out on our bikes riding around, I dont think theyll ever solve it, though actually doing proper repairs in the first place would help.
Next year! the holes opposite work, the repairs didn't last two weeks.
Just don't cycle through it then
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