With the elections coming I am seeing lots of posts about road repairs, quite a few saying "Good to see repairs being undertaken in X or Y" and also quite a few saying "They're only fixing the roads because an election is coming."
As you know I am responsible for potholes. All of them. They are all my fault. And whilst itโs nice to see credit being given for more repairs being undertaken it is unfair to say this is linked to the elections.
You may have noticed the weather has improved. Less rain. Higher road temperature. This means Hampshire Highways can do more in terms of patching and fixing.
From December to February the number of reports of potholes exceeded the number of repairs each week. Since then the trend has reversed and in the last three weeks considerably thanks to extra resources - both money (from HCC's budget and the ยฃ6 million given to us for pothole repairs in the budget) and staff (as we have been able to stand down those on gritter duty for example).
There remains much to do of course, and I suspect the comments to this post will fill with "but you've not fixed the dreadful pothole at X or Y". As you might imagine there needs to be a hierarchy for deciding priority.
We are prioritising repairs where there is a genuine safety concern above everything else (the arbiters of whether a safety concern is 'genuine' are our highway engineers who assess them).
We then look to repair those with the greatest impact on traffic and road safety, so on 'A' roads and main routes, then minor routes and finally residential streets and side roads. It is of course generally much easier to avoid a road problem on a quiet side street or lane than on a busier route.
Finally, do please continue to report any road issues you come across. If they are already reported, not fixed yet, but getting worse then do update your report to say so or report them again.
You can find all the reporting tiles to do so here: https://www.hants.gov.uk/tra.../roadmaintenance/roadproblems
Thanks so much for bearing with us. It's been the worst possible winter for road damage and there remains a huge amount still to do.
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