Pothole goals

An underwriter based in the UK has found the ideal means of scoring brownie points with the motoring community and raising its public profile.

Warranty Direct, a company that provides extended warranty coverage, has set up a website, 'www.potholes.co.uk', which encourages motorists to report potholes. The company claims on its site that road works in England and Wales are underfunded by 50 per cent -- roughly £1 billion a year.

Now the company has latched onto an even more appealing argument -- that speed humps are just as detrimental to a car's suspension as the potholes. Sounds obvious enough in itself, but the powers-that-be have just come to recognise that in 'Old Blighty'.

Last week, the British government announced that municipal bodies introducing restricted (20MPH or 32km/h) speed limit zones are no longer required by law to install traffic-calming measures in these zones.

The initiative -- and a raft of other safety measures -- more or less falls in line with recent traffic flow research outlined in the book Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. You can get a feel for Vanderbilt's book by reading an excerpt.

In the UK, the government is actively encouraging more low-speed zones, since research has shown that they reduce the road toll by more than 40 per cent. Apparently, municipalities have been slow to establish more of these speed-restricted zones -- presumably due to the cost of installing the traffic pacifiers more than the possible backlash from road users. Vanderbilt, in his blog, reports that the London borough of Islington is embarked on a campaign to impose the 20MPH limit on 150 miles of local roads -- leaving just 15 streets out of 1420 set at a speed limit as high as 30MPH (48km/h).

According to a press release issued by Warranty Direct, repair of all potholes and road imperfections, allied with removal of speed humps and 'sleeping policemen', would reduce suspension damage by six per cent. The total suspension repair bill for motorists, spread across the population and over a year is £413 million a year and the average repair bill is £240.

A spokesman for Warranty Direct, Duncan McClure Fisher said: "Speed humps are as much of a menace as potholes, and do much the same damage. As motorists, I think we'd all be glad to see the back of them. It's time for the Government to rely on the common sense and good driving manners of the majority of drivers, rather than punish everyone with big repair bills."

Australian consumers would probably welcome a similar outbreak of common sense among our municipalities and the civil engineers employed in local government, but there's a sneaking suspicion out there in the community that unspent budgetary allocations for traffic pacifiers would be an abuse of discretion -- and a civil engineer not working full-bore on new ways to aggravate drivers might be a bludger. Beyond those considerations, perhaps bureaucrats don't trust the majority of Aussie motorists to drive safely and sensibly. Who knows, maybe they're right...

And as for a website reporting potholes in Australia, the webserver for that site would crash faster than VirginBlue's ticketing system during Schoolies Week.