Heavier electric cars blamed for the £16bn cost of pothole plague
Heavier electric vehicles and larger cars are helping push Britain’s crumbling roads to ‘breaking point’.
The pothole backlog repair bill now stands at a record £16 billion, as compensation claims soar.
The warning comes in a report which highlights how changing driving habits are putting increased pressure on local roads across england and Wales.
it found the pothole repair bill has surged by £2 billion (16 per cent) on last year, with one in every ten miles of local roads now having surfaces in a ‘ poor’ condition. This equates to around 22,300 miles.
But even more worrying, over 107,000 miles of local roads – 53 per cent – have deeper structural problems and risk crumbling completely if not re-built within 15 years.
The crisis has sparked an 80 per cent surge in compensation claims lodged with town halls by cyclists and drivers, with nine in ten relating specifically to pothole damage.
The bill for payouts has soared by nearly a third, from £11.6 million to £15.2 million, according to the report by trade body the asphalt industry alliance (aia). it said the growing crisis was being fuelled by ‘increased average vehicle weights on a deteriorating network’.
This includes more than 1 million electric vehicles ( evs) — three times the number in 2019 — now on the roads. evs cause twice as much stress on tarmac because they greatly outweigh their petrol or diesel equivalents. Heavy batteries in large models can weigh more than a ton.
New cars have been growing at an annual average of 10kg heavier and half a centimetre wider in recent years, also driven by growing demand for SUVs.
The aia said the shift towards online shopping, which took off during the pandemic, means more heavier vans and delivery trucks, many of them evs, are on the roads, too.
Other factors fuelling the crisis, according to its report, are the increased frequency of extreme weather, more traffic and the impact of rampant inflation. This has caused the average cost of filling a pothole to rise to £72.26, up from £66.54.
although cash budgets for fixing local roads have increased, in real terms they have either fallen or stayed level for most councils.
The annual aia report, based on data supplied by local authorities, said it would take ten years and £16.3 billion to clear the current pothole backlog.
it is the third year in a row that the estimated cost has increased.
The Daily Mail has been campaigning for an end to the nation’s pothole plague, which is costing drivers millions in repair bills and putting cyclists’ lives at risk. Tory MP for Buckinghamshire, Greg Smith, who sits on the Commons transport committee, said: ‘This does need to be acknowledged and addressed.’
Simon Williams, roads policy chief for the RAC, said: ‘the scale of the problem now facing councils is truly gargantuan.’
aia chairman rick Green said: ‘Couple this with the effects of the extreme weather we are increasingly facing, and the result is that the rate at which local roads are suffering is accelerating towards breaking point.’
The survey found that an estimated 2 million potholes will have been filled in by councils by the end of this financial year (2022/3).
But the rate at which local roads are falling into disrepair means they are still playing catch-up.
in October last year, the Government announced it would provide £8.3 billion of extra funding over 11 years to fix potholes in england.
This is money saved by scrapping the planned Birmingham-Manchester leg of HS2. But Mr Green added: ‘There’s still a mountain to climb . . . it’s clearly not going to be enough to halt the decline.’
‘The problem is truly gargantuan’