The UK’s pothole epidemic continues to wreak havoc for drivers, with pothole-related breakdown numbers up by 10% in the last 12 months, according to the RAC.
Data from the driving services company, a partner to the 2024 Great British Fleet Event, reveals it attended 27,205 breakdowns in the 12 months from 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024 – that’s 2,299 more than the 24,906 incidents for the previous year.
The analysis shows drivers are now almost twice as likely to suffer a breakdown due to sub-standard road surfaces as they were in 2006.
And the RAC says that drivers have actually ‘dodged the pothole bullet’ in the last three months, when milder weather led to patrol callout rates dropping by 22% from 10,076 last year to 7,904 in 2024.
Sub-zero temperatures in the winter months normally cause more surface deterioration as water gets into cracks in the road, freezes and expands. In the first three months of 2024, while there was an average of 121mm of rain – 22% more than normal – the milder weather meant there were only seven days of frost, against the usual average of nine. This potentially limited the number of brand-new potholes forming.
As a result, the RAC doesn’t believe the year-on-year Q1 decrease in pothole-related breakdowns is a sign of road conditions improving. In fact, the RAC Pothole Index, which measures the likelihood of suffering one of these callouts, increased, meaning drivers are even more likely to experience damage now than they were 12 months ago.
And compared to 2006 when the RAC first began tracking these faults, drivers are now nearly twice as likely (1.76 or 76% more likely than 2006) to experience pothole damage.
RAC head of policy Simon Williams said the lack of widespread sub-zero temperatures had masked the true state of our roads.
“After all, all the cracks left by years of declining road maintenance budgets can’t easily be filled. Even though the Government has given councils an additional £8.3bn for road maintenance from the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2, we know this is only enough to resurface 5,000 miles of roads – the equivalent of just 3% of all England’s local roads.
“To make the most of this funding, we implore local authorities to focus their efforts on resurfacing the worst roads in their areas rather than pointlessly trying to patch pothole-ridden roads that can’t be saved from further decline.”
Williams also urged councils to use the current time to take preventative action.
“It’s between the warmer months of April and September when vital surface dressing work can be carried out to extend the life of roads. Sadly, government data we analysed shows 60% of English councils didn’t do any such work in the 2022/2023 financial year.”
The RAC has also asked drivers to pitch in and report potholes by using Stan; a new free mobile app capable of automatically detecting road defects via a smartphone camera mounted in a cradle.
The data is helping build the UK’s first-ever national map of road surface issues – and the RAC is urging local authorities to use the data to locate problems on their networks and carry out repairs quickly and efficiently.
