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Surface Dressing

fricatus

I drove the N9 between Waterford and Kilkenny today and couldn't believe my eyes. KK county council have decided to resurface the road using surface dressing.

If you're not familiar with that, it's where they put down a covering of wet tar and lash on a whole load of gravel. Then they let the cars mash the gravel into the tar. For a while, you get these mounds of gravel in the area between the wheel tracks, in the middle of the road and out at the verges.

Honestly, this is the crappest way ever of resurfacing a road. My car was shot-blasted by lorries on the other side for 2 km solid, even though I kept to under 50 km/h. Thankfully mine is a 99 model and I'm not that bothered any more how it looks. I'm just going to get the miles out of it until it dies and save up for a newer motor in the meantime. However if I was travelling from Waterford to Dublin in my brand new black Lex, I would sue KK co council, I swear.

Is there any other local authority so backward that they use this method of "resurfacing"? Will they maintain the new M9 to that standard?

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Bards

fricatus wrote:

I drove the N9 between Waterford and Kilkenny today and couldn't believe my eyes. KK county council have decided to resurface the road using surface dressing.

If you're not familiar with that, it's where they put down a covering of wet tar and lash on a whole load of gravel. Then they let the cars mash the gravel into the tar. For a while, you get these mounds of gravel in the area between the wheel tracks, in the middle of the road and out at the verges.

Honestly, this is the crappest way ever of resurfacing a road. My car was shot-blasted by lorries on the other side for 2 km solid, even though I kept to under 50 km/h. Thankfully mine is a 99 model and I'm not that bothered any more how it looks. I'm just going to get the miles out of it until it dies and save up for a newer motor in the meantime. However if I was travelling from Waterford to Dublin in my brand new black Lex, I would sue KK co council, I swear.

Is there any other local authority so backward that they use this method of "resurfacing"? Will they maintain the new M9 to that standard?

Thankfully the NRA are in the process of gaining control of the maintenance of the road network (especially the new inter urban's) and taking it away from local county council's.

but yes. KK Road Maintenance is always this crap.. they do this with the N10 almost every year... they must spend the smallest amount of any local authority on roads in the whole country.

MrPudding

They do the same here in the uk. We are now in the redressing season and I have had a few close calls on my bike.

Apparently the authorities here only get the money to resurface a road every 75 years so the chippings are the best they can do.

MrP

fricatus

MrPudding wrote:

They do the same here in the uk. We are now in the redressing season and I have had a few close calls on my bike.

God, I hadn't thought about motorbikes... worse again!

But surely to God they only do that on rural roads, not on national roads (A-roads in the UK I guess would be the equivalent), right?

MrPudding

fricatus wrote:

God, I hadn't thought about motorbikes... worse again!

But surely to God they only do that on rural roads, not on national roads (A-roads in the UK I guess would be the equivalent), right?

They do it a lot on the country roads alright, very irritating as this is where we like to go on the bikes. They also recently dressed most of the roads in Milton Keynes, these are reasonably large roads, dual carriageways in some cases.

They will also do it on A-roads, I have seen a few.

MrP

mike65

Tis evil! Its even worse when a road has been relayed and smoothly Tarmaced then months later the boyos arrive to sprinkle the stones on top.

Some sort of directive should be passed but I suspect collusion between council managers and local quarry owners. Joke.

Mike.

kowloon

I too have had many close calls on my bike, loose chippings make the things handle like shopping trolleys on ice, its usually better to take a different route for a while after they do it.

Del2005

How can this still be legal, in this day with Health and Safety as it stands? Lets stick a lick of tar on the road and then throw a load of loose chippings onto it. Does that sound safe! If a farmer/contractor working off the road drags a bit of muck onto the road and you crash you can sue them, but the council can purposely leave a road it a lethal state and get away with it. And don't say about the lower speed limit, if you have to do an emergency brake on that stuff good luck at whatever speed you're going.

MrPudding

Del2005 wrote:

How can this still be legal, in this day with Health and Safety as it stands? Lets stick a lick of tar on the road and then throw a load of loose chippings onto it. Does that sound safe! If a farmer/contractor working off the road drags a bit of muck onto the road and you crash you can sue them, but the council can purposely leave a road it a lethal state and get away with it. And don't say about the lower speed limit, if you have to do an emergency brake on that stuff good luck at whatever speed you're going.

Dressed road surfaces are actually very grippy, once the loose chippings have been removed. I think ideally the road would be dressed and then rolled and then any excess removed. It is just cheaper to let the vehicles do the rolling and then come back later to remove the excess chippings.

I had heard that the reason council in Ireland dress newly surfaced roads is that there were a number of cases of them being sued. When a road is newly laid there are oils which move to the surface, in the wet they can be quite tricky. A few people crashed and then sued the councils. The councils response was the chippings. Not sure if that is true.

MrP

jrar

MrPudding wrote:

It is just cheaper to let the vehicles do the rolling and then come back later to remove the excess chippings.
MrP

Mr P, I'm hoping you had your tongue firmly in you cheek when you wrote that - I have NEVER seen a council come back and remove the excess - they just let the traffic eventually send all the loose unrolled chippings into the verges and ditches.

Some roads in north Kildare seem to get an annual dressing - just last week a section of the Clonee to Leixlip road was done, and Kellystown Lane behind Intel is due it's annual "dressing" soon as is the back road from Straffan Court Hotel to Celbridge.

Del2005

I know they are gripy when finished but what I hate is the leaving of all the extra chippings on the road to let cars roll it in. Is it also not a terrible waste of money and resources to throw tonnes of stones onto a road for cars to roll a bit in the let the rest fill in the ditches?

vektarman

These unfinished surface dressings are extremely dangerous for a bike, it's all very well letting cars or trucks press them in but the mounds they create cause all kinds of problems for motorbikes, my motorbike went from under me when I met one of these gravel mounds on a left hand bend between Kill (no pun intended) and Straffan, no warning signs, no loose chipping signs, nothing. Fortunately I only received a fractured shoulder, I slid across the oncoming lane, luckily there was nothing coming the other way, BTW I'm a careful biker with 25 years experience on bikes.

fricatus

vektarman wrote:

These unfinished surface dressings are extremely dangerous for a bike, it's all very well letting cars or trucks press them in but the mounds they create cause all kinds of problems for motorbikes, my motorbike went from under me when I met one of these gravel mounds on a left hand bend between Kill (no pun intended) and Straffan, no warning signs, no loose chipping signs, nothing. Fortunately I only received a fractured shoulder, I slid across the oncoming lane, luckily there was nothing coming the other way, BTW I'm a careful biker with 25 years experience on bikes.

Glad you're still around to tell the tale

Imagine if you weren't... you would be reported as having "lost control of his motorcycle", when this stupid means of resurfacing a road would have been at fault.

I don't know how recent this is, but did you sue the council, or at least look into it? At the very least I would have e-mailed KE county council (yeah I know, an e-mail, big swinging dickie...), asking them how long they're going to keep up this practice, and copied KK county council too.

Seems from the replies here that there's a lot of objection to the practice anyway. I mentioned my car's paint job... then the much more serious issue of the danger to bikers came up... but how about just the backward image that it portrays of the country?

Can you imagine the CEO of some company flying in that day to Dublin and travelling down to Waterford to discuss the location of some facility or other here, rather than in Slovakia or Malaysia? Bad enough that they have to endure Castledermot or Thomastown, but then they see the 1970s methods we use in this country to "maintain" national roads? I can imagine that after 5 minutes hearing loose chippings hitting the car they'd tell the driver to find a driveway to turn around in so that they can get the fu(k out of the country!

vektarman

Hi Fricatus, yes I sued the council, their defence was that it was carried out by sub-contracters which, of course, was no defence at all. I had never sued anyone in my life, I'm not a compo grabber, but I made an exception in this case as KCC almost left my wife a widow and my kids without their dad all because of pure laziness and cost cutting by the council, as you say it would hae been another case of 'motorcyclist lost control of his bike'.

_Kaiser_

Meath CC do the same thing.. they recently resurfaced the road just beyond the Ratoath turnoff outbound in the same manner as well as other roads around the county.

Although given the shocking state of most of the roads in Meath, it's actually an improvement. They definitely don't spend the budget on roads anyway.

spacetweek

fricatus wrote: »

I drove the N9 between Waterford and Kilkenny today and couldn't believe my eyes. KK county council have decided to resurface the road using surface dressing.

This is a disgraceful standard for a road as immportant as the N9, but I wonder if they're doing it because the N9 is soon to be downgraded to an R-road as part of the new N9 project. This would let them off the hook as chippings are not acceptable on an N-road but are just about ok on an R.

mike65

Anyone who uses the N route between Kilkenny and Clonmel will be familiar with the road resurfacing north of the Carrick turn, but its not chippings they are using, they are laying out a lovely flat smooth quiet asphalt carpet. Quite why they can do a proper job on one and not the other is for KCC to explain.

Mike.

Danno

KK done it along alot of the N77 too, didn't do it over the white lines tho

dubtom

Are county councils not obliged to at least inspect the work of contractors. In two area's tonight, howth and concolbert rd outside Houston station,a temp surface (I hope their temp)has been laid, I assume because work has been done on the road. But both are the most appaling jobs I have ever seen . In both I'm convinced they didn't even bother to roll the tar down,so it just a bumpy surface. In howth I would guess the bumps are about 12 inches deep. Is there no standard that contractors,or indeed councils themselves, have to adhere to.
Where do I stand if I break a shock on my car because the road is left in this condition, or worse still run off the road and hit someone.
I have to be honest here and say that I don't actually blame the council as a body for the condition of the roads in this country, but rather the employee's who don't bother doing the job their payed for.

Fratton Fred

They did this to the road I lived on in High Wycombe. The really great thing though was that they did it two days after repainting the road:rolleyes:

(someone got the timetable wrong at the local council)

Be not afraid

So as to not create a new thread with the same topic, let me chime in and say that driving on surface dressed roads wears tyres out much faster (anecdotally wears tyres twice as fast) than asphalt roads. Surface dressing is also the primary source of noise in otherwise quiet modern cars, it makes you feel you're driving in a 3rd world country. This has two main concerns 1. your tyres will be in a dangerous state much sooner (half the tyre longevity) and 2. the extra total cost of much earlier tyre replacement, borne cumulatively all the road users, is much more than the savings the council achieved by choosing surface dressing over asphalt. Surface dressing is window dressing to make the councils look like they're doing something.

Del2005

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120771083#Comment_120771083

They could use a safer method for resurfacing roads, if a farmer or builder dumped gravel on a road they're partially liable for any RTC, yet councils regularly leave the roads in a dangerous condition. More serious than the damage to cars, surface dressing is lethal for 2 wheeled road users and trying to use a wheelchair or buggy will be difficult.

blackbox

The only place they should use chippings is in the overtaking lanes of dual carriageways and motorways.

The horrible noise might encourage drivers to keep to the driving lane when not overtaking.

Be not afraid

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120771333#Comment_120771333

You might be on to something here, put a noisier surface (though not the dreaded surface dressing) e.g periodic rumble strips on the overtaking lanes on these multi-lane roads. In areas with 3 or more lanes each way put an even higher frequency of rumble strips on the right most overtaking lane. The rumble strips could be 3 or 4 parallel strips of layered paint or high grip sturdy plastic across the lane in question. Put a set of these "rumble" strips say every 500 meters on the overtaking lane and if a 3rd lane every 250 meters. Anything that incentivizes moving as soon as possible to the driving lane and out of the overtaking lane(s) is a good thing in my book. Maybe an overhead sign or two along on each major interurban indicating overtaking lane and driving lane. Also, put roadside signs every 5km saying "By Law: Only use right lane to Overtake"

[Deleted User]

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120774938#Comment_120774938

A lot of the time "overtaking lanes" are just room for more cars, plenty of roads don't have the capacity to handle the volume of traffic solely in the inside lane.

blackbox

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120779792#Comment_120779792

If they're driving faster than the cars on the left and keeping up with the car in front of them, that's OK.

AugustusMinimus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120771083#Comment_120771083

Is this supposed to be a joke?