Essay by Eric Worrall
Apparently it’s the climate causing potholes, not slipshod, incompetent road maintenance, super heavy EVs, or people switching to large SUVs because of all the potholes.
Climate change is causing a pothole plague. Are robots and self-healing pavement the solution?
Mia Taylor 25th January 2024
Extreme heat waves, wildfires and flooding are among the most obvious impacts of the Earth’s changing climate.
But dire weather events are not the only way global warming is wreaking havoc worldwide. Climate change is also creating a pothole plague.
In 2023, there were nearly 630,000 reports of potholes in the UK, which marked a five-year high, according to data compiled by campaign groupRound Our Way. In the United States, meanwhile, about 44 million drivers reported damage to their vehicles from potholes in 2022, which was a massive 57% increase over 2021, according to AAA.
While ageing infrastructure and limited road maintenance budgets play a significant role in the problem, another culprit behind the marked proliferation of potholes is severe weather brought about by climate change, which is weakening roads.
“There are a number of issues caused by climate change that are impacting roads,” says Hassan Davani, Ph.D., an associate professor in San Diego State University’s Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering. “Excessive heat can ultimately cause buckling of the roads, where additional thermal stress to the pavement materials can lead to cracks and potholes. We’re also experiencing more extreme flooding events, which causes a higher velocity of stream flow over the roads, resulting in more severe erosion of the pavement.”
…
Among the intriguing innovations emerging is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and robots to address transportation infrastructure problems, including potholes.
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240124-climate-change-is-causing-a-pothole-plague-are-robots-and-self-healing-pavement-the-solution
Other commenters paint a slightly different picture of the situation;
Pothole politics is paralysing Britain
The nation suffers from executive dysfunction
…
Recently, though, we’ve gained a new unit of stupid political measurement: the pothole. Labour councils could have filled 24,000 potholes with the money they spent on diversity and inclusion in a year, according to a press release from CCHQ this week.
The briefing has an unmistakable whiff of election messaging. It came on the heels of a renewed pledge by Rishi Sunak to tackle Britain’s increasingly potholed and unpassable roads, and suggests the Tories are jockeying for position as the party of people who live in the material world, as opposed to those Marie Antoinettes of moral abstraction and virtue-signalling on the Opposition bench.
But can they pull this off? I’m not convinced. During a recent campaign visit to Darlington, in which he promised to address Britain’s pothole-ridden roads, Sunak pointed out a particularly large offender to the national media. But even after becoming, however briefly, Britain’s most famous bit of missing tarmac, it took another two weeks before anyone came along to fix it.
…
Read more: https://unherd.com/2023/04/pothole-politics-is-paralysing-britain/
On balance I suggest government incompetence seems a more likely explanation than climate change. Perhaps if the government allocated more funds to fixing potholes, instead of blowing all their cash on green energy and white elephants like HS2, there might be fewer potholes.
Could robots help with road maintenance? Maybe – but given Britain’s dismal track record with government IT projects, I expect a robot road repair programme would be dogged by hilarious and excruciatingly inconvenient failures, like robots running off the road and filling holes in the wilderness, or filling all the drains because they mistook the drains for potholes. I imagine similar problems would occur with any government attempt to streamline resource allocation using AI technology.
In the meantime, my suggestion is if you haven’t already, consider purchasing a vehicle which can handle our degraded roads. Such vehicles are expensive to own in Britain, but repairing an axle broken by a degraded, poorly maintained road is also expensive. Such vehicles can also handle snow and ice much better than normal automobiles, when the government neglects to buy road salt for winter. If you install a bull bar, you are also much safer if you hit a large animal, like one of Britain’s out of control feral deer population. I’m not suggesting even a sturdy off-road vehicle would be guaranteed to survive a collision with a big buck, but driving a rugged vehicle has significantly reduced the risk of a feral animal encounter wrecking my vehicle or causing me injury.
Barely a day goes by I don’t encounter degraded road conditions which affirm my decision to purchase an off-road vehicle.
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Mary Harrington who wrote the second quoted article says showing a pothole to Rishi Sunak got it fixed in just two weeks. Maybe the solution is to report potholes to the PM’s office.
I recall seeing a car sticker recently near Cessnock…
The rains and floods we had a 3 or 4 years ago, certain did have an effect on road condition..
.. but remarkably, a lot of the damage around here has been repaired. !
Make sure that repair team gets their hot tea and slice of cake at Christmas!
Britain is a remarkable place, it’s amazing who will offer you a hot cuppa.
I was waiting in the street on a cold night just before Christmas in a high crime inner city neighbourhood of a large British town, while a friend visited her sick mum in her nursing home, when someone tapped on the window.
He said “would you like a cuppa?”.
I said “sure, really nice of you, thanks!”
The guy came back with a cuppa.
A few minutes later he came out for the empty, and said “Sorry to ask, but can you please move the car from in front of my house?”.
I said “sure, what’s up?”
He said “Its just I’m expecting a delivery from London, and if they see a white guy in a car sitting in front of my house you might scare them off”.
Of course I complied, it was a lovely cuppa, and there was now a spare car space closer to the nursing home.
Nicest move along request I’ve ever received. No doubt he was expecting a special delivery of Christmas chocolates, from some nervous chocolate delivery people.
Speaking from the pothole capital of North America…
Potholes is one reason to get a high SUV with long travel in the shocks.
Increasing numbers of heavy SUVs is one reason that there’s more potholes
Indeed – a feedback loop.
Well, it it works for the SUV ;manufacturers, can’t it work for the wind turbine manufacturers?
As amusing as your feedback loop is, in our area of Canada with its plethora of Teslae, the Teslae are still heavier than the ICE SUVs. Blaming SUVs for road damage and not mentioning the weight of EVs contributes to the gaslighting of the populace (“ICE bad, EV good”).
Moreover the EVs do not contribute to road maintenance taxes. Which they should be doing seeing as how potholes can ruin their batteries and effectively their vehicle, while only inconveniencing the ICE vehicles.
Only minor pothole damage… pothole next to concrete curb..
It is plastic so I should be able to push it back out.
That kind of damage is why I went 4WD SUV.
Grunty and smooth Mistu 380, I only paid $5k for.
A bit low on the road due to lowered shocks..
… but that means my “solid” staffy can get in and out easily 🙂
A doggy step might be cheaper…
My wife wants a full-on Jeep Unlimited – go large or go home
A Jeep?
Make sure your front and rear tow hooks are in good shape, and there are appropriate flat surfaces at the rear end to facilitate pushing.
🙂
daft low to road cars and even more daft lowprofile tyres;-) always got dings cant even park to a normal kerb without similar damage to yours
ps plastic heat it or it wont pop it will shatter(funny how a plastic crap bumper repair can cost 4k? and a metal one- a lot less- or even replaced at wreckers for 150 or so.
if it doesnt have road clearance for a stubby bottle then its not fit for aussie roads, mostly suburbia- and thats just bunny high not even echidnas or roos
Low-riders, automobiles that have been lowered so that the body of the car sits only inches above the road, must be having some difficulty with this increase in potholes.
Many of the Low-riders have adjustable suspensions and have the ability to lift the chassis up or down, so it’s probably not a problem for that subset of Low-riders.
Low-riders, when completely lowered, look like an accident waiting to happen, to me, even on a good road. 🙂
Low-rider:
The pot hope pandemic is explained by the decision of all councils to sub contract out the basic duty of the council. Our own local authority paid a well known organisation £260million and awarded a ten year exclusive contract to the company to maintain the local roads. Nothing was maintained the roads disintegrated and the company was rescued from closure by a government grant. The roads still don’t get maintained but the company that does not do what their contract paid them to do continues to exist and continue to do nothing…?
Meanwhile the DEI funding at council HQ has achieved great results. We now have one of the most diverse inclusive bunch of failures yet produced.
A small authority in Central England for those wondering.
Ha Ha, Pot hope should be pot hole, maybe a subconscious thought crept in…Please bring the edit button back.
It’s back.
I wrote this line using the edit function.
Where is the button, it doesn’t show on my laptop
It is to the lower right. Click on the little symbol and “Edit” will show.
Your mouse pointer has to be within the comment box for the symbol to appear.
When they do resurface a road the asphalt is applied as a very thin layer. It doesn’t take long to deteriorate allowing water in
cheap as chips
The head of the firm that supplies that stuff (Bitumen Emulsion ##) was writing somewhere recently.
There’s only one ‘real’ supplier of that stuff in the UK so he’s fairly clued up.
He was saying that, typically historically, his firm shipped/sold enough of the stuff to resurface 28Million square metres of road surface annually.
But the amount he’s been asked to supply is dropping dropping dropping and for the most recent year he had figures (2022) his firm moved only 14 million m²
## It is quite delicious stuff, it is water based tar. First time you ever meet it you wonder “wtf is this piss-water slop?
Big Mistake: get even a small amount on yourself or your clothes and it dries almost immediately to something like leather crossed with contact-adhesive and the only thing that will then move it is copious amounts of paraffin or petrol.
It does the same if you apply it to tour road, garden path, concrete, brickwork, slabs & flagstones etc. It is quite “tenacious” – for lack a better word.
The thinking behind what you say is perfect and logical.
What it does is to re-seal the old road surface and give it back some flexibility. ‘Flexibility’ was and is the reason that Tar MacAdam is such a good material for making roads – it gives you some ‘bounce’, unlike (say) concrete or hammered stone/rock
But that re-surfacing has to be done regularly and often – once the original layer of ‘tar’ in the road surface gets old and dries out, it starts to crack and let water in.
The very flexibility then becomes the road’s worst enemy. As traffic runs over the road, it flexes those tiny cracks and effectively hammers the water into the road surface like countless trillions of tiny chisels.
The tarmac, being quite old/dry/hard by then, cannot glue itself back together in warm/hot weather and when Jack Frost arrives on the scene – that’s it.
i.e. The road surface simply explodes
And once it starts, the loose stones and chippings work as even harder chisels hammering the road to complete buᵷᵷeration
Is it asphalt, or gravel and bitumen?
Very different.
Asphalt requires a special “spreader” machine, and a large heavy roller.
Usually laid about 2-4cm thick.
Most road around here, except the main highways, are gravel and bitumen.
“Asphalt requires….. a large heavy roller.”
What a give away.
If they are putting down less than 2″ then it is simply a Band-Aid. Surface mix (with 3/4″ max aggregate) at 4 cm thick can end up with two rocks making up the entire thickness … two stacked rocks, as a small portion of a flexible pavement, are going to fail. (An inspector with 50 years experience pointed this out to me).
I don’t like anything less than a 3″ lift. I would rather fail in my compaction spec with a full 4″ lift than be going out twice with 2″ and meet compaction. (I would rather put in a thick lift 8″ AC right on the subgrade without a rock base than waste time subgrade that is going to fail eventually anyway.)
At 35 years out, even with shit 20 year design parameters, I haven’t seen any significant issues on anything I have been involved with.
(Early on, I had the lead City reviewer require that I provide a justification for my road design even though I was simply proposing the same standard that had been in place locally for the the last 30 years. So, I was forced to dig into things and (as my boss said) go ahead and reinvent the wheel. Rather than 4″ AC over 12″ base as originally proposed, I put together calcs that showed 3″ over 10″ would suffice for the 20 year design. My boss stamped it and submitted it, and it is still holding up 30 years later with no need for any remediation or repair. I didn’t like it … I did it out of spite towards the City a-hole … it was the flimsiest structure I have ever put in as a public road, but it is still there without issues.)
Subgrade is most important (including potential water intrusion). Then AC mix/thickness, then rock base. If you lose the rock base into the subgrade then it is time to start over (and skip the band-aiding). Road fabric is everybody’s friend.
In the UK we’ve never been taxed as heavily as we are now. Yet the country is falling apart
Now I wonder where the money is going
The answer is blowing in the wind…
I ranted about this story ten days ago: https://cliscep.com/2024/01/15/potholes-to-be-made-worse-by-climate-change/
Great writeup, thanks for sharing Jit.
The robots do not help. I know this very precisely because here in north west England the council robots are already in place: they are (still) ‘working from home’ because of ‘covid’ and they are doing bugger all. Not even dealing with the potholes.
Those working from home should be given a pay cut. They no longer commute and could actually sell their car. The no longer need work clothes
That should mean no pay rises for 5 years
If you look closely, the commuting is not tax deductible, i.e. it is not a cost of business. Unless one has very special clothing requirements (set by the employer, not you), clothing for work is not a cost of doing business, thus not deductible.
I wonder how many people realise just how much is involved in building a road that will actually stay together under repeated loading….
As part of Civil Engineering you learn all about the structure of road design and building.
Combined soil mechanics, complex curve alignment and super-elevation design etc etc ..
What load do we want it to be able to withstand over time ???
Everything is built with a cost/benefit sort of procedure in mind, as well.
The main question is…”how well do we want this road to perform and over what period of time.”
Road sub-base… what is available and cost effective ?
How much cut and fill is needed…. (surveying)
What surface to use? Asphalt is great, but costs a lot.
Hard gravel and bitumen is cheaper , but is more susceptible to sub-base and water issues.
What is the geology of the soil ground underneath..
Darn acid clay can be a real PITA because when you load it, it sinks and squeezes out yucky sulphates.
Not going to give y’all a complete run-down…. would take a couple of semesters at uni.
and funny how the old blokes on councils knew this and used that knowledge and our backroads were good…until mod tech and big money took over and screwed it fully. old dirt roads round here are raise with good slope for runoff decent side drain areas and while muddy corrugated and some potholes, all up theyre still better than main roads on certain times
NOT anything “green”.
Here in Michigan a leftist Dumbocrat governor Witless won her election by pretending to be a populist with a “Fix the damn roads” slogan.
She won. Her solution was a new 50 cents per gallon tax on gasoline, which the people and legislature rejected.
Our roads are especially bad because of the use of salt — we have local salt mines — that melts snow and ice and the water gets into cracks in the road. Overnight the water freezes and lifts the broken portions of roads. Which eventually become potoles.
There is not much repairing until the spring when they use a cold patch that is pressed in place by cars driving over it.
The potholes are especially dangerous for sports cars with low aspect ratio tires. The tire can blow out and the expensive rim gets dented too. Can not be fixed. Replacements are on the $500 to $1000 range,
gee mate your vid clip is of a GOOD road;-)
try the Wimmera highway Horsham to Edenhope. did that in ambulance with good shocks on thurs am and it was a trip from hell, you wouldnt want broken bone for that trip.
or Harrow to Casterton or Coleraine and up to Hamilton
all heavily used by B doubles and logging trucks
all pretty much dissolve in a wet winter.
the single track asphalt back roads in Vic are killers you have to pull half n half to pass oncoming and the verges are deathtraps- a wider potholed dirt tracks safer, because morons cant try n do 100k on those.
Local councils used to do pretty good fast repairs until big govt palmed it off to private cos at 1mil a km or more huge machinery should be faster n better right?
nope any repairs done seem to manage about 6 to 10 mths then back to hellish.
of course the soil profiles and actual roadbeds its laid on? well they dont seem to BE taken into account over here, a foot or two of sand over ironstone “coffee rock” and then clay..
In a world where technological advances include the ability to send a device into orbit around other celestial bodies people still travel on roads built with basically the same materials and techniques as those used by the Babylonians thousands of years ago. Roads built later by the Romans still exist and are in use today. Perhaps the pothole is not only the result of ineffective research and engineering but also the low-bidder process that encourages skimping on the actual construction itself.
Heat does not cause potholes in roads. Potholes in roads are caused by either poor construction (inadequate base and subbase materials below the final paving layer, poor quality materials, and poor construction methods), or by excessive loads heavier than design. For instance, in areas with clay soils and/or cold winters, clay swells and contracts with moisture levels that vary throughout the year, inevitably so, everywhere and all the time, which is why an adequate road base of non-expansive soils and compacted crushed stone are necessary in such areas.
Roads are designed for a specific maximum wheel load (in the US it is called “HS20”) based upon the legal axle weight for 18 wheel trucks, and a specific number of repetitions of those loads over time. If the wheel loads are heavier, or more frequent than designed, then the pavement life will be shortened. Typical pavement design life in the US is 20 years, and may be different elsewhere. If the road authority does not rebuild the pavement when its design life or design loads is exceed, then the pavement will fail including pot holes.
As for heavier SUVs, that makes no difference at all in pavement life. It is only the very heavy loads from semi trucks, dump trucks and such that determine pavement life, not the relatively light loads imposed by light trucks, SUVs, and passenger cars (including EVs). It is a matter of materials science. I write this as a long time civil engineer.
That picture at the top, it was from Victoriastan, wasn’t it? Their government has been infested with socialists for decades, so much so that you can tell when you’ve crossed the border by the change in the sound the road makes as you drive it.
QLD I reckon.
Pot holes are caused by shoddy road construction, poor water management, and overweight vehicles.
Climate (change) has nothing to do with asphalt road degradation. Asphalt roads must be ground down and repaved on rather short time spans. And if not maintained will become pothole nightmares in any climate. Also if the road bed was not properly prepared, no amount of repaving will fix them.
Furthermore, these reports of millions of drivers reporting vehicle damage from potholes is wholesale lying or delusion or both. Diligent and competent drivers will see and avoid potholes, or slow down enough to prevent suspension or wheel damage. (potholes that are filled with water and not visible are another story)
I’m semi retired and to stay active physically and mentally, I work as an automotive repair tech part time. We just had two separate cars in for repair yesterday where the right front wheel impacted an immovable object with significant momentum. Each had a destroyed tire and rim, bent lower control arm, bent spring/strut, bent steering tie rod, bent sway bar links. (also usually axles do not break in these situations, only the suspension elements bend or break)
These components are designed to be sacrificial in a collision, so that you do not damage the sub frame or unibody chassis. Both drivers had bull$hit stories about what happened. In each case the forensic evidence is they were traveling too fast in the rain, and skidded into a curb at high speed. One of these cars had bald tires on the front and had turned full left to attempt to avoid hitting the curb but the car went straight due to the bald tires and excessive speed in the rain. It is ironic that the bald tire person could have saved the $3,000 cost of repair by replacing all 4 tires instead of only the rear ones recently and this would have only cost an additional $300…. (they had brand new tires on the rear, but left the bald ones on the front)
My point is that it is not just govmnt mismanagement of road repair, but drivers in general are also idiots and contribute substantially to their own detriment. To my view, too many idiots are both in charge of road maintenance and behind the wheel of vehicles regards this issue.
Being a somewhat experienced driver of 50+ years, I’d suspect the bald tires too and add that inexperience in hard braking on wet roads is a big contribution. My first experience of that was when I about 14 as I witnessed some poor bloke on an icy road on Mt. Buffalo, coming down a narrow road with cars on both sides. The car started to slide off the crown, so he braked, instant 4 wheel lockup, and I saw the front wheels turn to full opposite lock. He bumped the parked car, took his foot off the brake, a headed for the opposite side only to repeat his first mistake. It was painful to watch as he repeated the same fundamental error about SIX times leaving a trail of dented and bruised cars. So my lesson at 14 was, don’t brake and expect steering at the same time. Choose one or the other. Having bald tires only increases his chances of early lockup and loss of steering. I’m so very thankful my current car has ABS, a brilliant invention well worth the money.
I would guess that 90% of potholes occur on previously excavated/repaired road, beginning with a breakdown at the repair margin or a collapse beneath it. Often repair is carried out along one lane. Then later the adjacent lane. The joint will break down. The problem is engineering and quality control. Not weather per se
Perhaps if the government allocated more funds to fixing potholes, instead of blowing all their cash on green energy and white elephants like HS2, there might be fewer potholes.
There might be fewer potholes at any one time but it won’t affect the total number of potholes.
Just now, in the roads round about where I live, there are lots of potholes. I don’t think that at this time of year they are caused by extreme heat.Nor is there any flooding. But we have had quite a bit of cold weather.
There is also an issue of the materials and techniques used by Councils to fix potholes. In my area the Council uses the quickest and cheapest method rather than the most long-lasting method.
The magic of “climate change”: It’s simultaneously the excuse for government failure and for more government.
My municipality can’t manage pavement, but they think they can change the climate.
Once again, the politicians send out “political messaging” without a whiff of actual science.
What causes potholes?
I live near the exact center of the U.S. Therefore, we get some very hot summer conditions, some very cold winter conditions, and everything in between.
In my personal observations, the majority of the pothole formation/expansion for the year occurs in the few weeks of winter where there is water in the potholes and they are going through a daily freeze/thaw cycle.
I can literally drive the kids to school in the morning when temperatures are still below freezing, and then pick them up in the afternoon and observe large chunks of asphalt, concrete, and road base gravel strewn on the road surface subsequent to the daily melt.
Is that true where the rest of you readers live?
Further, is it possible for us to send all of our politicians back to the manufacturer as defective?
water in the potholes and they are going through a daily freeze/thaw cycle.
That is my experience on the private road I maintain. Heavy rains during warmer times can cause problems, but it’s definitely exacerbated in freezing weather. Doesn’t help that it’s also much more unpleasant to get out and fix them.
Y’all do know that potholes didn’t exist before 1820.
Macadam – Wikipedia
Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, then about 280 ppm, and potholes have been growing in lock-step since then.
Freeze thaw cycles, abetted by salting icy intersections is what causes potholes where I live, so I’m thinking “global cooling” would make a pothole plague worldwide rather than “global warming”, but if they can show more freeze/thaw cycles due to “climate change”…well they have a good addition to their talking-points-for-the-gullible.
Long time ago, asbestos was used as an additive in asphalt. The fibres helped to give a modest amount of tensile strength to a material that had essentially no tensile strength of its own, thereby giving it a longer useful life.
Now, of course, we can’t use asbestos, but you would think some bright young technologist could find a non-carcinogenic fibrous material to help bind asphalt together.
A cynic might conclude that the companies supplying asphalt wouldn’t want to make a longer-lasting product, because that would impact their future sales.
Aberdeenshire council (in Scotland) defines a pothole as:
“a serviceable defect within the public road envelope”
Whether those serviceable defects were in fact serviced is more difficult to assess.