Top dressing

[Globalti]

I can understand the need to top dress but why oh why must they use stones the size of house bricks. Riding any road in Hampshire that has just been done is like trying to cycle along Brighton beach. I don't know anything about road building but would have thought a smaller gravel would stick better and give improved traction and car ride.
Any of you civil engineers car to educate me on the need for boulder size gravel?

Yes, those are granite chips. It's extremely expensive to crush all that granite up into chips; making them smaller would increase the cost considerably.

 

[derrick]

It's a cheap bodge, They die most of the Epping roads a few months ago, it ripped my tyres up pretty good. They should give a warning a couple of weeks before they do it give cyclist's a chance to find another route, After a couple of weeks it's fine, after 6 months it's worse than it was before they did it.

 

[ColinJ]

I have decided to study this so I know more about the subject of my complaints!

I have now found a very interesting website which tells you (approximately!) 17 times more about the subject than you ever wanted to know and about 5 times more than you thought that there was to know ...

Fellow 'miserable whining ingrates' (©2015 @Globalti), I bring you - 'The Idiots' Guide to Highways Maintenance'!

 

[ColinJ]

It would have helped if I had given you the LINK! (Done.)

 

[derrick]

It would have helped if I had given you the LINK! (Done.)

Oh that's alright then.

 

[ColinJ]

I have speed-read that and it seems to me that the quality of the road surface isn't so much a question of cost as the skill of the crew doing the work. (You might argue that it is cheaper to hire workers who do not really know what they are doing, but the author of that article states that it is much more expensive to repair bad work than it is to get it right first time, so that argument doesn't hold water!)

 

[Foghat]

If contractors applied, highways engineers specified, and local authorities enforced, the guidance in that document, there would be a lot less discomfort and danger to cyclists, and improved road conditions overall, whererever surface dressing is regrettably chosen instead of better (re-)surfacing.

Unfortunately they rarely do.

 

[youngoldbloke]

^ this. Our local high street was top dressed without fixing the cracks and potholes first. You would have thought the contractors might have noticed, but it was only when the parish council complained that operatives returned, the chippings shovelled out of the holes, the cavities filled and the repairs re-top dressed - with a different grade and colour of chippings - a permanent reminder of the original cock-up.

 

[Levo-Lon]

Amaizing how often blokes in hi viz knock on doors in areas where this is being done ..claiming to have spare tarmac..

 

[EltonFrog]

@DaveReading was this TD on the A4155 Marlow Road in Reading?

 

[DaveReading]

@DaveReading was this TD on the A4155 Marlow Road in Reading?

No, B481 south from Nettlebed.

 

[aferris2]

They have been doing a lot of top dressing here in the last month or so. Best one so far was a small lane which is probably only used by locals. Even though the signs said "Road Closed", I hoped I would be able to get through on 2 wheels rather than do the 3 mile detour. The workmen were still working on the road a bit further up when I arrived so asked if it was OK to go through. "No problems", so I turned down the short lane. It's only a hundred yards or so. Downhill to a t junction where you have to give way. What did I find? 2 HUGE skid marks that had torn all the way through the new dressing and across the road at the end! How difficult is it to understand that the new gravel is going to be slippery.
By next morning the road had been re-dressed and the 20MPH signs replaced with "DEAD SLOW"

 

[mjr]

(You might argue that it is cheaper to hire workers who do not really know what they are doing, but the author of that article states that it is much more expensive to repair bad work than it is to get it right first time, so that argument doesn't hold water!)

Except that there now seem to be too few council officers to check the contractors' work and if the public report problems most officers seem happy to claim that any old rubbish is standard practice, so there seems little chance of being made to repair bad work at the minute! So why not save the money?

Kudos to the parish council mentioned. Holding higher layers of government to account is an increasingly useful thing for parish councils to do but it's a frustrating distraction from their core tasks.

 

[Drago]

I hate the bloody stuff. At best its a short term fix. As it wears so that happens is it provides an additional abrasive medium which wear a the true road surface below, actually shortening the life of the roads structure. Another unfortunate side effect is that wear exposes sheet of vitreous bitumen which are like ice when wet, and these patches inevitably appear on corners where you least want them.

The ancient Romans made the most daring, successful, longest lasting roads that mankind has ever seen, and one thing they didn't do was surface dressing.

 

[bpsmith]

Ironically, the other thing the Roman's didn't do was corners.