Farewell potholes? UK team invents self-healing road surface

I did a road trip through Europe a few years back, and when we passed from Romania (coming from Cluj) to Hungary, the road immediately got _comically_ bad. As we got closer to Budapest things seemed to improve, but wow, I vividly remember this.

I'd be curious to learn whether it's a lack of maintenance (Hungary generally seemed well maintained except for the roads though) or something else.

A higher aggregate mix sounds more like Tarmacadam (i.e. tarmac) although probably with a bituminous (rather than tar) binder these days.

The higher aggregate mix generally doesn't make for a more durable road though, but there's far more to a good road than just the materials its made from.

More stones also make asphalt more slippery in wet conditions don't they?

Pretty bad for bikes though, and pushchairs.

Or that they steal the important ingredients from the mixture and the company who does the quality assurance is also on the "payroll".

I single-handedly got the mayor of my small town to fill in a bunch of potholes on a road leading to my parents place. I have an old car and while the suspension is great, it's destroyed the bottom of my car and multiple valences costing me a lot since it sits so low. I started calling the mayor every single day and we ended up talking for a few hours.

Nothing got done until I distributed flyers and went knocking on every single home along my route to my parents on that shitty road and got everyone to call him whenever they could.

The road got fixed and has stayed that way. The grand irony is that the hill is so steep that the only way I managed to get up it was with those potholes. Now I have to take the long 5km route around every time because my car can't make it up this smooth dirt road in the winter now as my car is sub-1000 kilos. I think the gas and lost-parts cost has now evened out at least!

If you do not fill cracks in roads you get potholes. Lack of cheap maintenance causes expensive repairs and reduces the lifespan of a road. Typical shortsightedness.

If you see black lines in an asphalt road (which are not straight) the odds are good you have a municipality which does maintenance.

Cheaper only because you're subsidizing the cost of the road (by delaying maintenance) from the pocket of the road users which will now collectively have to do maintenance on the car slightly sooner on average, with some people getting the brunt of it if they have an actual accident that requires immediate repair. In some worse cases it even makes a road much slower to traverse in order to deal with the constant bumps, basically returning to the quality of a gravel road, which also has potential economic impacts on "trade".

It's a lab experiment on a tiny crack. There is as far as the article goes zero real world data.

> Are we really buying this?

No. I'd figure that most HNer's know The Guardian has a strong "optimistic fluff" bias, and some of us feel like venting our spleens about potholes and poorly-maintained roads.

At least in the towns and cities, I believe it is because the utility companies can cut up the roads, but the cuts are never repaired to the same quality, allowing water ingress and creating weaknesses that seem to 'seed' potholes.

I used to live in Edinburgh and the roads were like an uneven tar patchwork.

Nah, it's not a hypothecated tax. It all goes into the general fund. Same for vehicle tax.

In my (mostly uninformed) opinion, a lot of road maintenance was outsourced to the private sector on long (like 20+ years) contracts in the 2000s (2004 for 25 years in my town). Predictable result is predictable.

Lots of rain and its erosion effects. Nevertheless UK roads are some of the least potholed I have come across.

I believe that potholes are the responsibility of councils - so neither (income) tax nor fuel sales are linked to the funding.

Yes, fuel duty does bring in a lot of money, but it doesn’t go directly into fixing the roads—it generally goes into the government’s general budget.

Local councils who are responsible for fixing the roads have been underfunded for years and is normally the area that gets squeezed the most. The British weather doesn’t help too with constant rain and freezing winters…

The roads in England are terrible, the roads in the rest of the UK are far better.

I live in England and commute to Wales, you can hear when you cross the border.

What I've heard (with regards to Irish roads) is that it's several wet months each year where the ground temperature frequently goes above and below zero degrees.

So the water keeps filling any small cracks, freezing and expanding, then defrosting and refilling the now bigger cracks. There's many days in the winter where this process might happen several times over a single 24 hour cycle.

It's basically the worst possible scenario for road longevity, or any kind of buildings.

However, while this sounds plausible, I don't know if it's actually true. I haven't heard it confirmed by a civil engineer.

Chronic underinvestment.

Since ~2010, the UK started cutting costs everywhere. Current costs were harder to cut, broadly speaking investments were cut more. Things like fixing roads was on the list - because a slightly broken road is still mostly usable. But of course that cascades quickly into an unmanageable mess of potholes. It's also one of those things where small frequent repairs are presumably cheaper in the long run than leaving things until you can't ignore them anymore, then having a major repair job to do.

Probably like most countries. There's budget for new projects, but never enough for maintaining them. And like with all maintenance, not doing it will lead to higher costs down the road.

True. But when a tiny minority (folks with heavy trucks) have an intense interest in getting away with something, while the vast majority can't be bothered to pay any attention to the issue...

To be fair, terrible roads might reduce accidents, reduce speeds, unnecessary vehicle usage, and turn the usual road rage into rage against the road, creating a bond between different drivers rather than antagonism.

And it's also a net positive for mechanics and parts manufacturers. Basically a win-win for society (except for drivers, ofc).

(partly /s and partly not, as I surprised myself realising how bad roads might actually have positives)