Road surface dressing rubbish

[snorri]

I think it illustrates a total lack of understanding of the needs of cyclists. It is hard to imagine that there is anyone employed in the relevant council departments that has any knowledge or experience of riding any bike - let alone a road bike. It seems to be assumed that 'cycling' means riding a mountain bike with knobbly tyres - otherwise how can you account for the condition of many cycle routes? I would be very interested to see the council's response.

After numerous complaints to the roads authority regarding lack of maintenance of a segregated cycle path beside a dual carrriageway, a site meeting with a couple of these road engineer chappies was arranged. We managed to get a couple of bikes for them to use during the site survey of some two miles of path. They arrived, and we cycled along the said route stopping every 50 metres or so for us to point to them the defects which ranged from surface weeds, overhanging branches, puddles, broken surfaces, street furniture causing obstruction etc etc. At the end of the survey one of the engineers commented about the number of cyclists seen cycling on the road during our survey and asked me why they were not using the path, he thought they were "mad". I told him it was glaringly obvious to me as a cyclist why they were cycling on the road, I had spent the last two hours telling him how useless his path was,but he just looked at me blankly, I thought he was taking the ....., it really was a time for tearing my hair out! It was illuminating, and partly explained the pathetic responses given to written complaints about the path, these guys just didn't understand, they had never walked or cycled the path they were responsible for maintaining.

 

[Alembicbassman]

Doncaster MBC are fond of this method at the moment. Dreadful stuff, moraines of gravel piled up in the gutter, lethal for 23c tyres. I give these roads a miss for a few weeks until the gravel has shifted

 

[HLaB]

There's a lot of roads round my way where the surface dressing treatment won't work no longer so they are actually scraping the old top coats out, its a total nightmare for bikes, exposed telecom holes, etc. (or whatever they are called, the ones which are small and often in the middle of the road but not constantly) which aren't marked.