It’s not just rural roads like this that are being stricken with potholes — motorways are being hit, too.

It’s no surprise that after just a couple of weeks of snow and cold weather, out roads are littered with potholes that simply didn’t exist before Christmas. But why? 

Potholes.co.uk says the use of cheap materials – brittle, porous Stone Mastic Asphalt as opposed to the more hard-wearing Hot Rolled Asphalt – to surface and fix roads over the last 10-15 years is now leaving Britain gridlocked.

I’ve never heard of Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA) or Hot Rolled Asphalt (HRA) before, and I suspect you haven’t either, so what’s the difference?

Stone Mastic Asphalt vs. Hot Rolled Asphalt

If you want to see what they two types of asphalt look like, click here and scroll down about half way to a group of four images. I’m sure you will recognise both the HRA photo (bottom left) and the SMA one (bottom right).

There’s a clear difference between the two and its easy to imagine how HRA may provide a smooth, sealed surface that should be fairly hard for water to penetrate, whereas the SMA has a open, fragmented surface into which water, and hence ice, can easily enter, causing frost damage and potholes.

Note: I know nothing about road building or asphalt and could be completely wrong. But the evidence of my eyes suggests that there is a problem with the road surfacing materials used in the UK — otherwise potholes wouldn’t sprout everywhere after just a couple of weeks of normal winter weather.

Back to the potholes

Potholes.co.uk, which is operated by Warranty Direct, says that data taken from 10,000 pothole reports on its website reveals that not only are the craters appearing on the UK’s crumbling network deeper than ever before, increasing in depth from three to four inches on average in the last two years, but that the problem is not limited to smaller, rural roads.

Warranty Direct managing director, Duncan McClure Fisher, said:

“The pothole epidemic is the direct result of years of under-investment in our roads by the Government. Temporary fixes have just escalated the problem over the years and our highways have now got more holes than Swiss cheese.

“Unless more permanent repair materials and methods are adopted immediately, Britain may never again be able to get through a winter without having to contend with a Third World road network.”

Third World may be a slight exaggeration, but I’ve driven on roads all over continental Europe, including Germany and Scandinavia, where the winters are much worse than the UK — and I’ve rarely encountered major roads with as many potholes as those around my home, in the North of England.

It just isn’t necessary — road surfaces can be made more frost-proof than they are, and it would save councils hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, if not millions. 

We pay the price

Individual motorists, fleet operators and car and van hire companies are being hit with escalating repair bills as tyre, wheel and suspension damage runs rife as a result of the nation’s potholes.

Although a careful driver can avoid many potholes, sometimes — in busy traffic, darkness, rain and snow — it just isn’t possible and you end up crashing through the pothole instead.