Potholes and bad roads

By johnredwood on March 8, 2026

I recently used the M6 Toll road again. Free flowing, good services area, no potholes. What a contrast with some of the nationalised motorways. In the last one a half years a government that hates motorists has starved them of maintenance so we now have the potholes we are used to on lesser Council roads on our most used and biggest highways. Hitting a pothole at 70 mph can do more damage than on a slower road. Motorists have to keep lane discipline to avoid other vehicles so they usually cannot swerve to avoid.

All my life our roads have been inadequate. Always too little capacity and under some governments and Councils badly maintained. In recent years the highways authorities have done their best to reduce capacity for cars and to make it mire difficult to drive anywhere.

We need to put in more capacity to cope with the huge increase of population and to accommodate all the long haul trucks for imports necessitated by the government's huge industrial plant and factory closure programme.

The obvious way to do it is to allow new toll roads or toll lanes adding to existing roads. The driver paying the toll for less congestion and a better road wins, but so does every other road user as the public roads paid out of taxes also become less congested.

The large number of prolonged road closures reflects dreadful public sector management. Toll roads stay open as much as possible as their owners and builders beed the revenue to lay the bills.