Who is Millington?

Richard Millington has been riding for more than 30 years, touring for more than 25, and has never looked back. He’s the founder of Motorrad Tours, and has ridden on five continents, guiding motorcycle tours in Europe, Africa, North and South America and Asia. www. motorrad-tours.com offers a wide range of adventures, with something for every rider...

Councils have to grade them to prioritise their repairs. Yes really they do plan to repair potholes.

I like Essex, who grade them orange or purple. Presumably this a deliberately obtuse colour coding so you cannot tell how seriously they are treating them. I mean red, amber, green is a system people understand, but orange and purple. Why not pink or aubergine?

Councils also use liability to grade them. Are they going to get bills for repairs to wheels and suspension on people’s cars if they don’t do them? Is there the risk of an accident? How in a first world country does it get so far that the risk of injury or accident is the justification for repairing or leaving a pothole?

So, colours don’t work, exclamations don’t work, and leaving it until you need to call an ambulance seems a bit... after the fact. How can we grade potholes effectively so that they can be understood? Then I came up with a radical idea for the UK. Why don’t we build better roads? I am not being glib or sarcastic. The UK is not a place with massive ground instability. We do not live on shifting sand, sliding tectonic plates or slipping mountains. We do not have the extremes of temperature that many parts of the world have. I have ridden in Canada and Alaska where the roads put up with temperatures far below zero and then short periods of summer heat. In the north of Vietnam temperatures range from minus five to plus forty. Many places have massively more challenging environments for road builders than the UK: temperatures, monsoons, landslides and more. Some have roads worse than ours, some better, but why are ours not much, much better than they are? It would save all the hassle of having to grade and define potholes.

Maybe it has something to do with the £20 billion plus raised from motorists that we do not spend on the roads? Maybe it is that we tender out works to the lowest bidder and not the best quality. I shall avoid the tempting digression to rant about Carillion and their like.

Perhaps if we are not going to spend all the money we raise from using the roads on fixing them then we should adopt the policy that it seems most South East Asian countries use. Build great roads and then do nothing until they are just series of craters linked by tarmac ridges and then build a new one. Hang on, is this not actually the secret UK policy?