Zen of the Road

No Zen Approach to Road Conditions

By Kent Barker

I hit another pothole yesterday. There was a nasty crunch but, as far as I could see, no damage to the wheel. It was not always so. A few years back I was driving down the same lane in the dark and there was a massive bang. When I examined the wheel rim the following day the alloy had splintered, slashing the tyre.

I was quoted nearly £400 for a new wheel and £75 for a tyre! In the end I found a second hand wheel and a slightly cheaper tyre, but it was still an extremely expensive incident. My son (who doesn’t have a licence and thus doesn’t pay for the upkeep of a motor) had an interesting take on it. He argued that potholes give driving an added frisson and chuck in an element of chance to every journey. Every time you don’t hit a pothole and damage the car is, he said, a good day and one to be celebrated!

Instead of taking this Zen-like advice, I complained long and hard to the County Council who, eventually, came along and filled in the hole. But it was only one of many. The whole road is pitted with crevasses all waiting to surprise the unwary motorist. Most, it is true, are caused by contactors on behalf of various utilities digging long trenches and then failing to fill them in properly. But does the road ever get properly resurfaced? Do any of the roads around here get properly resurfaced? You just know those questions are rhetorical, don’t you?

I remember an epic journey about a decade back. I’d bought a boat off eBay from somewhere near Retford and was returning home with it on a rather ropey trailer. We were OK going down the A1. It was fine on the M25. It was even all right on the A20. But as soon as we came off onto a ‘B’ road around Sissinghurst, the surface became so uneven that the craft started bucking around on the trailer as if it were sailing a stormy sea. The point is that roads maintained by the Highways Agency are relatively smooth and flat. Roads maintained by Kent County Council are an absolute disgrace.

And it’s not just road surfaces where they seem to fail so dismally. I chair the Highways Committee of our Parish Council and we’ve been campaigning for years to get better speed signs around our village and limits reduced. Will KCC’s highways officers engage with us? Will they come and look at the problems we’ve identified. Again you just know the answer, don’t you?

Apparently one criterion they employ is the number of deaths on a given stretch of road. If insufficient people have been killed they won’t consider lowering the speed restriction.  Am I alone in finding this abhorrent? Surely they—we—should be trying to prevent deaths, not waiting for them to happen.

But then I’m not too impressed with their attitude generally. Our Country Councillor has been campaigning for ages to have the A229 priority altered as it approaches Cranbrook. Currently, you have to make a right turn across the opposite lane in order to continue on the main road—effectively the town’s by-pass. If you go straight on, you hit the narrow High Street with two sharp dogleg turns. A foreign articulated lorry was just the most recent of vehicles to misread the signs and get stuck. So the simple solution is to make the main road continue to the right, and oblige you to turn left into the smaller Waterloo Road if you really want to go into the town.

But were the county’s highways officers sympathetic to this scheme? Apparently not. It was either too expensive, or too difficult or didn’t quite accord with the small print of the rules. So they’ve prevaricated for years on the issue. I thought that council officers existed to do what they were asked by the elected members. If councillors say this needs changing, the civil servants should say right, let’s find a way to do it. Not our lot. Quite the opposite.

Of course, the situation wasn’t helped by an extraordinarily vociferous campaign by a group of local residents who seemed determined to prevent the change at any cost. My view is that they were misguided and have blocked a perfectly sensible proposal. But they did have one salient point. As far back as 2006, KCC estimated the cost of changes to this junction at £300,000. Currently just £24,000 is being spent to try to achieve the same objective.

So whether it’s potholes or road signs or speed limits or improving junctions, KCC seems unresponsive or obstructive. But, with continuing central Government cuts to Council funding, I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised at lousy services.