Prepare for Potholes

The director of highways has warned we can expect more potholes to appear on the roads in the coming weeks.

Jeff Robinson was speaking at a public meeting in Douglas South organised by MHKs Claire Christian and Sarah Maltby.

Having been asked by a resident about damaged to the road surface in the constituency, Mr Robinson said the cold weather would lead to more potholes opening up.

He said: ‘What we are going to get now, having been through a cold patch, we are going to get lots of potholes breaking out over the next few weeks, you’ll see the roads really deteriorate quite quickly now, which is difficult.

‘What we are very good at, though maybe not everyone recognises this, we’re very good at fixing potholes and fixing them quickly. Quite often within a couple of hours of somebody reporting a pothole, they’ll often say to me and Ian [Bates director of public transport] on my way home, that they’re fixed.

‘Because we have parish wardens in each of the areas who will respond very quickly to those. I think some of the confusion comes when they go along and it’s not actually a pothole, but the whole road is beginning to fail and then we have to go home and plan something.

‘There may be a temporary fix done where there’s a particular dangerous piece of hole that’s in a road that’s basically failing and so we have to make that temporary fix and then go away and start planning something a bit more substantial and the reality is that is limited by the budget we have each year.’

Mr Robinson said that from the DoI’s budget, it has to prioritise which roads get attention and when and while this can be impacted by reports from the public, how busy the road is, is also a big factor.

He said: ‘Nobody will be surprised that we tend to want to spend money on the main roads than we will on cul-de-sacs going down to somebody’s house, though I understand completely that that is really frustrating for the person that lives in that area and I know that in terms of life satisfaction, having a road that you feel is reasonably good outside where you live makes a big difference to your wellbeing, so as part of the government’s strive to make better places to live, we’re really trying to bring that together.’

Mr Robinson also said that the DoI has ‘perhaps in the past been too keen to go into the countryside and do roads that people perceive as going to nowhere, I can tell you they’re all on the back of complaints, but maybe we need to move away from that’.

The director of highways also noted that while people see the tech used in the UK and further afield that it is claimed fixes potholes in minutes, he said the patches that they create tend to last ‘only six months to a year’.

Reporting

While Mr Robinson said the DoI often fixes pothole on the same day they are reported, the key element to that was people reporting them.

To report a pothole, you can either click here or download the notify.im app.