As long as there have been cars on the road, there have been potholes. Longer, even. Just how many horses were victims of pothole related injuries back in the 19th century we may never know, but what we do know is that those little ditches are the arch nemeses of drivers and local councillors alike.
You may feel like it isn’t possible for roads to get worse than they are in your hometown, but unless you live in Stoke-on-Trent, you’re mistaken. Over there, the council has had to pay out nearly £370,000 in compensation to people whose vehicles were damaged by one of the city’s hundreds of potholes. That’s enough to buy a four bedroom home in the area, and that was just in the last year.
So why are the roads so bad in Stoke? In short, it’s unclear. Some say it’s due to the wet weather, but that’s not exactly a Staffordshire-exclusive issue. The local council says it’s the fault of Westminster for cutting funding, but whatever the reason is, it’s becoming a real problem for the people living there.
According to an FOI request by the i, there were more than 6,000 complaints lodged against Stoke-on-Trent’s local authority in the past 12 months, and the Liberal Democrats recently revealed it took 19 months for the council to get around to filling in a single hole. On that timescale, it will take them nearly 10,000 years to get around to them all, by which point we’ll probably have flying cars anyway.
In the council’s defence, it isn’t alone in having absurdly long re-surfacing timelines. Westminster council took 18 months to respond to one request, and Norfolk, Sussex and Wiltshire all took over a year to sort a single complaint. Not ideal.
Hopefully some money will free itself up soon so that drivers of Stoke can zoom around without a care. What a world that would be, eh?
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