07-02-15, 09:10 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-02-15, 09:12 AM by Millietant.)
(04-02-15, 03:31 PM)lew600fazer link Wrote: [quote author=Oldgit link=topic=15882.msg182284#msg182284 date=1422977172]
must be the weather????
feck all to do with the weather, Rouen has a similar climate to the SE of England just they crack on and get the job done. Also the volume of traffic is heavy on that stretch of road. Maybe not M1 M6 M25 heavy but heavy enough. The road close by me here in Spain they did a 5km section both sides in a week. Okay all they did was fresh top and dress but they never seem to let it get to the stage of letting potholes get big enough to allow a juggernaut lorry to fall into. Lack of resources and a bunch of lazy assholes is the problem in the UK. Look at network rail for fecksake always delays when carrying out maintainence on the tracks, Christmas and new year was a disaster for commuters.
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Not all a bunch of lazy assholes Lew - the problem over here is beaurocracy and Safety Legislation - which we abide by and the rest of Europe don't. Also, they do lots of their repairs in thin one coat temporary overlays. It does keep the repair time down, but the repair doesn't last very long. A proper asphalt repair in the UK will last anywhere from 10 years (poor quality work) to 30 years (the quality of work we did in the late 70's and early 80's.
The Eurppean way of doing it works well in the short term (the term that concerns politicians), but in the long, our methods/materials lasted much longer and were better value - even though the initial cost is more, you only do half, or one third, of the repairs.
Where we went wrong was adopting the European materials, with the savings at the time, and then expecting the roads to still last as long (pretty stupid in my opinion), now we're paying the price.
In a past job, I've participated in the World Roads Conference events and was always surprised at how much other people's roads cost to maintain in the longer term - but their rewards are "newer road surfaces more often, that take less time to resurface, but they also have more resurfacings (over 30 years).
I actually would prefer some of the "foreign" methods, but the cost to the UK in the long term would be a massive increase (for a short term saving).