Check this press release :-
http://www.barnet.gov.uk/press_releases.htm?id=2201
Now I find the following paragraph to be, shall we say, a little misleading.
How can they talk about fixing holes in the road being an investment. It is a maintenance cost, often caused by previous lack of investment. This gives the impression that more money is being spent to improve the roads. The truth is that this money will just return the roads to a state resembling where they were before the bad weather.In total, the cost of the council's winter maintenance this year looks set to top £700,000. On top of that, £243,000 has already been spent on repairing potholes with another £285,000 of investment from April 2010 onwards needed to carry out the repairs to potholes identified through the council's comprehensive survey of every road in the borough.
Oh and as to the "comprehensive survey of every road in the Borough". How much did this cost? Why don't they just get the drivers of dustcarts (who cover every road in the borough and are professional drivers) to report back any known pothole location, with a risk severity rating?
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On the subject of road maintenance, an interesting question that needs to be answered is how the council is funding the resurfacing programme which started in 2002. My sources tell me that the council took out 40 year loans to pay for the work. If this is true, it is yet another example of financial mismanagement. It is one thing to borrow money over 40 years (or longer) to pay for a new school, but roads have a life expectancy of between 10-15 years which means we could still be paying for the current resurfacing long after the roads have been resurfaced again several times over.
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