Fill that hole: Report pothole hazards on your routes - fix potholes

You can also blame the anti-road protest movement of the last 20 years. The exactly the same blinkered fools who are protesting against Heathrow airport expansion, and who protest against nuclear energy. These environmentalists, with their direct-action protests in the 90's, made it impossible for the government to implement any proper new road-building, resulted in cutbacks to maintenance, and helped bring about serious underinvestment to the road network.

Now we are in a situation where we have seen large increases in motor vehicle traffic on our roads over the last 20 years, but it has not matched by appropriate increases in the funding of road maintenance. Couple this with contractors only do half a job of filling potholes with poor quality materials, and our bad weather, and you get to the despicable state our roads are in now.

Road building does not sort out the traffic problem. This has been show time and time again (M25 effect e.t.c), the problem is that transport is not seen a serious post with in UK politics so any good coherent plans are never followed through over the long term. Attempts made by politicians tend just be patches. Add to this the fear o change mentality that every human being has within them to the fact that British transport policy has been going down the wrong road for years (so people don't want to move off of the bad route as that is change) and it make life even harder to get anything done.