Skip to main content

Pothole pique drives UK man into action

Potholes are the scourge of commuters and the source of hours of complaining around the office water cooler. But some people do more than complain; they take action that gets results, such as happened recently in the United Kingdom.
December 12, 2014 Read time: 2 mins
Fertile ground for activists

Potholes are the scourge of commuters and the source of hours of complaining around the office water cooler. But some people do more than complain; they take action that gets results, such as happened recently in the United Kingdom.

He was dubbed the pothole vigilante, a 72-year-old man who decided one morning to fill one particular pothole he called “The Crater” after 17 months of complaining to the council.

That first pothole job took Reg Winsor 15 minutes to repair using a friend's tarmac and tools, according to %$Linker: 2 External <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 0 0 0 oLinkExternal a report by the BBC Visit BBC Website false http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-30412435 false false%>. 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.

"There is no money to do it, so what we are meant to do, sit on our backsides and do nothing? We are British and most of us Brits want to do something about it," he said.

The BBC reported that Devon County Council has a pothole repair backlog of around US$1.2 billion (£758 million) and it spends $1.57 billion (£1 billion) every year maintaining nearly 13,000km of roads.

In Russia, the news outlet %$Linker: 2 External <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 0 0 0 oLinkExternal Al Jazeera Watch Youtube Clip here false http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQoeBUKZQBg false false%> reported that 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.

But another Russian man has gone down the smartphone route and developed the pothole app. A person takes a picture of the offending hole and loads it onto a website that names and shames the local authority and leaders.

All three efforts in Russia have made councils move faster on repairs, Al Jazeera reported.

Related Content

  • Show of Strength for Asphaltica-Samoter 2014
    May 14, 2014
    This year’s 50th anniversary of the first edition of Samoter in Verona, Italy, could mark the start of a construction equipment sales’ renaissance for a nation with a rich construction equipment manufacturing heritage. Guy Woodford reports It’s been a tough few years for the Italian construction equipment manufacturing industry. A difficult domestic and wider European sales market coupled with a challenging European economic climate has created something of a perfect storm. But many Italian and other Eur
  • New conference plans for European road directors
    October 30, 2013
    Plans are in hand for the Conference of European Directors of Roads (CEDR). This event is now run every four years, with this next CEDR conference being the third to be held. The governing board for CEDR held a meeting in Helsinki and the Road Directors’ association reviewed the final report on the implementation of its previous strategic plan and the formalisation of its next. The CEDR strategic plan 3 (SP3) is to develop the priorities and targets for its next cycle. Each SP determines the structuring an
  • ARTBA announces student video awards
    October 21, 2016
    The winners of the 6th annual Student Transportation Video Contest by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association’s (ARTBA) have now been announced. High school students from Washington state and Massachusetts, an undergraduate at New York University and a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon were all named as winners. The selections were announced during the recent ARTBA National Convention, held in Tucson, Arizona. The winners will each receive a US$500 cash prize. The association received 3
  • Palfinger launches 30m truck-mounted platform
    January 6, 2017
    Palfinger Platforms has replaced its TKA series access platform with the P300KS. Mounted on a 7.5 tonne truck chassis, the P300KS has a working height of 30m with a maximum outreach to the side or the back of 20.5m. The cage, which offers 540 degrees of rotation, has a maximum load of 350kg.