Britain’s ‘pothole plague’ took even more of a toll on drivers in 2023 as RAC patrols attended nearly 30,000 pothole-related breakdowns over the course of the year, up by a third on 2022.
Roadside patrols at the motoring services company went out to 29,377 breakdowns in 2023 – the equivalent of 80 breakdowns a day – for faults including broken suspension springs, damaged shock absorbers and distorted wheels.
Looking at the most recent data from the fourth quarter of 2023, drivers called the RAC out to 5,153 breakdowns caused by potholes, the highest amount for any October to December period since 2017.
The RAC says the problem is only likely to get worse in the colder months of ‘pothole season’ – January to March – when water makes its way into cracks in the road, freezes and expands, causing surfaces to deteriorate even more.
Meanwhile, the RAC Pothole Index, which has tracked the condition of Britain’s roads since 2006, now stands at 1.70, up from 1.62 at the end of 2022.
While this is nowhere near the all-time high of 3.5 recorded in Q1 2010, at 1.7 the index suggests drivers are more than one-and-a-half times as likely to experience pothole damage as they were 15 years ago.
Simon Williams, RAC head of policy, said: “The cracks in Britain’s road maintenance system have once again been embarrassingly exposed as nearly 30,000 RAC members endured pothole problems and potentially very costly repairs in 2023.
“Potholes are so much more than an irritation – they are a very serious danger to all road users which we fear will only get worse as the weather gets colder during these next few months.
“Local councils have been cash-strapped for years due to lower road maintenance budgets, causing roads across the country to fall into disrepair and leaving drivers fighting for compensation when their vehicles are inevitably damaged.
“Fortunately, the Government has committed an extra £8.3bn of funding to local councils over the next 11 years, which we hope will give squeezed authorities some certainty of cash to help them plan consistent longer-term maintenance. Now we urge the DfT to lay out clear guidance as to how this money should be best used so that councils can actually improve their roads for the future.
In a bid to make highways authorities aware of as many road surface defects as possible, the RAC is joining forces with technology company Metricell to encourage drivers to use Stan, a new free mobile app that automatically collects data on the state of roads via smartphone video cameras.
The app uses AI to automatically identify more than 40 different defects including potholes, road cracking and broken signs, which will form a national road map of surface issues on the RAC and Stan websites.
Metricell will also share the data with highways authorities to help them locate the problems on their networks and encourage repairs to be carried out quickly and efficiently. The app can be downloaded via the App Store and Google Play.
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