Skip to main content

Pothole plan

Potholes are the scourge of commuters and the source of hours of complaining around the office water cooler. In the UK one pothole vigilante, a 72-year-old man, decided one morning to fill one particular pothole after 17 months of complaining to the council. That first pothole job took the man 15 minutes to repair using a friend's tarmac and tools. He reportedly said the hole was so big that a handrail should be put around it to stop people falling into it. He went on to fill 50 more potholes and the counci
February 24, 2015 Read time: 2 mins
Potholes are the scourge of commuters and the source of hours of complaining around the office water cooler. In the UK one pothole vigilante, a 72-year-old man, decided one morning to fill one particular pothole after 17 months of complaining to the council. That first pothole job took the man 15 minutes to repair using a friend's tarmac and tools. He reportedly said the hole was so big that a handrail should be put around it to stop people falling into it. He went on to fill 50 more potholes and the council eventually offered him some training and a job.

Meanwhile in Russia, angry commuters decided to embarrass their local officials into action. Some have been planting potatoes in potholes to see if the spuds will grow quicker than the time it takes the local authority to send out a repair team. In another city, activists are naming and shaming local politicians by painting facial caricatures of the mayor and council members around the hole with the hole as the face’s mouth.

Related Content

  • Winnipeg man celebrates years of road works outside his shop
    July 1, 2016
    After more than a decade of road works and repairs outside his business, one Winnipeg, Canada, resident told World Highways that enough is enough. “I’ve got no malice towards the contractors,” Gordon Partridge told World Highways. “Contractors are simply where they are told to be. It’s the city officials. The left hand doesn‘t always know what the right hand is doing.” What he has is “ambivalence and frustration at the situation”. As the health centre owner and chiropractor explains, “there’s two seas
  • Bomag’s president Ralf Junker puts his faith in BIM
    November 8, 2017
    World Highways recently caught up with Ralf Junker, president of BOMAG Group, during the company’s Innovation Days at its headquarters in Germany. David Arminas reports. Ralf Junker hasn’t forgotten his roots. You can put as much machine control as you like on a piece of construction equipment but all that high-technology is for nothing if the build quality isn’t there. Junker knows something about build quality. When he started at BOMAG in 1988, he was in the welding shop, eventually becoming supervisor
  • Fix your street with FixMyStreet
    April 19, 2021
    FixMyStreet Pro, which uses Yotta software, allows residents to report street and highway issues.
  • Trimble’s vision of a far more efficient future
    July 5, 2021
    Trimble is offering a future with more efficient, optimised construction operations for faster project delivery