The Road Condition Warning thread

nice new shiny tarmac on the Ardclough to Lyons jct rd (and filled in the dodgy potholey section on the NE heading side), prob get chipped fairly soon- although the rd up to Kilteel X was left for a while before chipping :rolleyes:

Wildly Boaring wrote: »

They will be a wearing course finish HRA, SMA, AC-WC.
Substantially more expensive than spray and chip.

If county council roads engineers had the budget our roads would also be billiard tables.
Most of them are good engineers doing their best with very limited budgets.

Somewhat off-topic, but in Dublin at any rate, much of the damage to the roads is due to the fact that any clown with a consaw is allowed to wreck them. Obviously the councils are either unwilling or unable to enforce proper reinstatement.

IME Eastern Europe, which isn't exactly awash with cash, has better roads than Ireland, both in urban and rural areas. Often far better. I dream of the day when our roads are up to Slovenian standards.

ARX wrote: »

Somewhat off-topic, but in Dublin at any rate, much of the damage to the roads is due to the fact that any clown with a consaw is allowed to wreck them. Obviously the councils are either unwilling or unable to enforce proper reinstatement.

IME Eastern Europe, which isn't exactly awash with cash, has better roads than Ireland, both in urban and rural areas. Often far better. I dream of the day when our roads are up to Slovenian standards.

Fully agree.
Often this is the council's mess up too.
There is a road opening licence process.

You apply for licence (pay a fee of course and a deposit!!) and do your road opening.
Generally reinstatement on an R or L road should be allowed settle for approx 6 months.

Council should then INSPECT, ensure road is fixed to correct standard and then final surfacing done.

From what I see this inspection and final surface is rarely followed up.
(try that ****e south of cork city and see where you get)

Sorry didn't mean to suggest there are uniform approaches. I was generalising based on my (almost) 20 years dealing with road surfacing and digging up roads.

And agree totally on a vast improvement if council engineers being stuck on a bike for a day about the place.

I'm sticking up for these boys a bit as I know the financial constraints they operate under.

You can't just compare one narrow aspect of a country's road network with others without some context.

Ireland is completely unique in terms of the amount of roads we have. I found this before and will put in italics

"Ireland has a far higher road density than most countries in Europe. There are 20.9km of road in Ireland for every 1000 people, more than twice the EU average of 9.6km and higher than significantly geographically larger countries like Germany which only has 2.8km.

Local Roads are broken into three classes,

Local Primary (LP) 23,789 km (14782 miles), Local Secondary (LS) 33,366 km (20733 miles) and Local Tertiary LT 23,789 km (14782 miles)

For a combined public road network length of 99,830 km (62,030 miles) in 2018

All of that has to be maintained; unless we want to spend almost 10 times per head off population than Germany I don't see how we can expect to have the same quality roads.

For a cyclist poor quality roads surfaces bring more advantages than disadvantages. Bad roads discourage drivers from using them and limit the speed they will travel at. If you can pick a line properly and have moderate handling skills dealing with potholes, loose gravel isn't a big deal.

I ride primarily on back roads, for me they can't be bad enough, but I'm often struck by how even the most obscure of roads get pretty regular resurfacing, a few examples below

https://goo.gl/maps/pyBhZdxXZnZQ7qG5A

https://goo.gl/maps/BfeuUAFTwE4GhLWk9

https://goo.gl/maps/z7UtF6nM1ihsW6Xx6

https://goo.gl/maps/CdXUGutJVcrgkBTWA

https://goo.gl/maps/B9zhEPoHa7SeMYN16

https://goo.gl/maps/PtQwhxwhhKJXCBQ37

No where else in the world has to maintain a road network like that.


The dispersed road network brings other problems. The Roads Act (section 76 I think) is very clear on the need to keep water from lands off public roads. Other than an odd council it isn't enforced and lots of landowners behave like cnuts. All you need is one b0llix to leave water out and a flood will do untold damage to roads that otherwise would last a very long time.

Sometimes, depending on local council you are dealing with abject stupidity. The road below is one I would be very familiar with. You can see water flowing on edge of road, to the right of jeep. There is a old stone culvert under road (actually man made stream taken off glen to ease to fill and pond which was used to turn a water wheel for corn milling and even battery charging over 100 years ago!) which was damaged when Eir cable was put under ground, they were called P&T then, it is so long ago.

https://goo.gl/maps/c9eMY7Msp3AZFkd99

Over the intervening 30 years, at every flood that drain has damaged road in question all the way south to regional road. Personally I have informed at least three overseers and my father at least two. Every summer they come back and repair the road. Two men, a digger and two lengths of pipe would have issue sorted in a few hours.

As an aside in or about 1987 or so my father an I brought a 1/2" water pipe and electric fence cable across the same road a few hundred metres south. All we had were hand tools. Timed it a few weeks before resurfacing works and it has been perfect since. Only traffic that passed was Josie Mulcahy on here bike

ARX wrote: »

When a road in Sweden is patched you can cycle over it and not feel a thing. The only way you know it's been patched is that the asphalt is a different colour to the rest of the road. Why can't that be done here?

There are plenty contractors here capable of doing similar work here; if you allow a budget to pay them to do it, pay for way more local authority engineers to check and enforce terms of contract, enforce the roads acts to reduce unnecessary road damage and subsequent costs.

Do we really want to pay for HRA or similar on our 80k km of local roads? Tar and chip is fine imo for such roads. Loose chippings are a necessary evil with such resurfacing but should be swept after bedding in as per guidance.

The issue with loose chippings is way better than it was, councils and contractors have been sued often enough for that to be the case.

We do have an issue with the ease with which roads can be opened, but a lot of that is political. A good friend is a roads engineer in a large county. When some contractor doing aerial broadband wanted to apply road road opening by townsland he said "no ****ing way". They effectively wanted to be left open the road wherever they saw fit, which would leave no records a few years down the line and road is b0llixed.

When he stood his ground every councilor(local election folk) objected.

Cork City council are pretty tight of road opening and I assume Dublin but I don't know.

Even a perfect reinstatement will weaken a road so it is defiantly an area we need to improve on in terms of planning (getting all services in plus spares at build stage) and using road openings more efficiently.

Main road through Clogherhead.

As you head north you go up the main hill in the village.

There's then a slight downhill before the turn off for port beach.

Just outside the newsagents there are a myriad of almost unavoidable potholes.

You can avoid but it means going onto the oncoming lane.

And other one.

Balrath towards Duleek.

Go past all the little Cul de sac roads and the turn off for ardcath.

Up a small hill and the last descent before the speed limits. A pile of potholes out in the left wheel track and middle of the lane. Under a lovely shady tree. I've dopily hit them twice in two weeks!!

Yeah the school has always been there

resurfacing the roads in this weather?? madness!!

the roads are like marmite out there

^^^^^^^

drove through a road like that yesterday, like being fired at by sub-machine gun

This is probably a short term one but Meath CoCo seem to driving around the place shovelling sand and grit onto the melting tar.

It's lethal. The excess is just loose sand. Met a bit on a bend and nearly shat myself.

Have seen it in 4 or 5 areas. Drogheda, Duleek, Skryne, Batterstown.

I haven't come across it actually spread, yet, but I have witnessed Wicklow Co Co gritter trucks on the road, so I assume they're doing the same carry on.

The top of the Long Hill, they have redone the green bit - it's well bedded in for the descent (not before it accounted for a motorbike the missus came across the other day), but alot of the gravel thrown out onto the uphill side of the road.

This road was chipped lately.

It's a disaster as not much traffic to clear it and quite bendy so they're not following same wheel tracks. AVOID!!

And the south end of this one got chipped couple weeks back, it's ok but not hectic

Also avoid laytown village for next day or two. Surfacing ongoing from new spine road to Aldi. Dodgy enough the weekend.