Aarrrggh! Bloody Cambs council

CambsNewbie

They have only gone and decided to do 'surface dressing' on my favourite circuit. This involves smothering the road in tar then chucking a load of loose chippings down. Going down a hill I was braking to slow my speed but could still feel the bike squirming below me. How I didn't come off I don't know!

The thing is the road didn't even need it! There's plenty of other stretches in could show them which are riddled with potholes! Now I can't use some of my favourite roads until the chippings have dispersed!

Damn you Cambridgeshire County Council!! :evil:

Rant over... on a serious note.. If I come off because of the loose surface where do I stand legally?

Mike39496

CambsNewbie wrote:

They have only gone and decided to do 'surface dressing' on my favourite circuit. This involves smothering the road in tar then chucking a load of loose chippings down. Going down a hill I was braking to slow my speed but could still feel the bike squirming below me. How I didn't come off I don't know!

The thing is the road didn't even need it! There's plenty of other stretches in could show them which are riddled with potholes! Now I can't use some of my favourite roads until the chippings have dispersed!

Damn you Cambridgeshire County Council!! :evil:

Rant over... on a serious note.. If I come off because of the loose surface where do I stand legally?

Probably at the side of the road swearing

bikermart

Or in A & E

It's not just Cambs where this is happening. We've had it all over cheshire as well. It's a quick and easy way of doing a crap job of "improving" the roads. At least for car drivers.

Come on, surely you didn't expect the council to take cyclists safety into account did you?

CambsNewbie

bikermart wrote:

Or in A & E

It's not just Cambs where this is happening. We've had it all over cheshire as well. It's a quick and easy way of doing a crap job of "improving" the roads. At least for car drivers.

Come on, surely you didn't expect the council to take cyclists safety into account did you?

How can the council do something so obviously dangerous to cyclists?

Not only was it difficult to control my bike, I was showered by chippings and tar from passing vehicles whose drivers couldn't understand a '20 MPH' sign.. :x

Vslowpace

You're pretty close to me and I think they've bought a job lot of the stuff because they've put it everywhere.

Penfold06

Its the same up here, Durham area. Right waste of time it is as well. Thats just money that could have been spent on fixing pot holes!

The road in front of my house was perfectly fine but a couple hundred metres down theirs a really nasty scarred bit. They resurfaced the whole stretch of road but stopped 10ft short of the scarred bit!!! so now the scarred bit remains and the once good surface has been turned to sh!t.

Drives me nuts.

Cleat Eastwood

ah I hate the stuff - one bit of road was so bad by me after being 'fixed' that I had to change my route for about 2 weeks. grrrr

tiredofwhiners

CambsNewbie wrote:

bikermart wrote:

How can the council do something so obviously dangerous to cyclists?

Its only dangerous to those cyclists going faster than the road conditions permit

But my local highways crowd have been spending money on the most bizarre locations and ignoring the bad holes no matter how many get reported on fixmystreet.org

Cannock Chase

bikermart wrote:

Or in A & E

It's not just Cambs where this is happening. We've had it all over cheshire as well. It's a quick and easy way of doing a crap job of "improving" the roads. At least for car drivers.

Come on, surely you didn't expect the council to take cyclists safety into account did you?

I assume most on here drive. The top dressing 'improvement' method is awful for motorists as well. I really don't see the point in it. Within a couple of years its all breaking up and worse than before.

the playing mantis

top dressing is comon as its cheapest option for councils. 'les not do it propery, lets rely on cars to force the loose chippins into the bitumen' typical half arsed bristish council fudging.

briantrumpet

Though look on the bright side - at least Britain's cool weather does mean that the tar sets - cycling through France in August, it was so warm that the new chippings and tar they had put down a day or two before were sticking all over my tyres, to the extent that I ended up getting off and walking along the verge, and then scraped the chippings off before I could carry on riding. Mind you, otherwise the heat was quite pleasant, I'll admit.

BTW, Devon's been at it too.

g00se

And Norfolk

rolf_f

They surface dressed the top of the hill above mine. Now it's done, the surface finish is marginally less pitted, though rougher than before, there are holes appearing in the surface dressing and for most of a week they left the loose material there - I had to ride in the car tyre tracks because they'd left an inch deep beach of gravel across the road; it's pathetic. You could do better employing the thugs that knock on your door and offer to do your drive cheap with some leftovers.

Sentral

Doing it all around Bristol as well. Seems like all the councils are doing it in preparation for the Winter, as it improves skidding resistance and 'protects' the road from further damage. Only costs £1 per metre as well, so that may have something to do with the popularity!

Syd_65

Found some in Bedfordshire yesterday afternoon...quite a bit of it in fact. It appears the seasonal loose chippings epidemic is well underway...

bazzer2

... and Somerset. Most of it.

MattC59

Yep, a lot of my par of Berkshirehas Ben done. There seem to be two grades offload repair around here:
1) out in the boonies, roads are surface dressed, and that's it. They seem to have had a glut of the clippings around here as all the country lanes have been done.

2) rip the road up and put down the most beautifully smooth F1 circuit Tarmac that you can imagine. The sh*t roads that have desperately needed repairing for a few years have been done.

Fortunately, they seem to be taking tha approach that anything which isn't a single track country road, gets the latter treatment

mikeabanks

... And Northamptonshire surface dressing only.

racingcondor

CambsNewbie wrote:

bikermart wrote:

Or in A & E

It's not just Cambs where this is happening. We've had it all over cheshire as well. It's a quick and easy way of doing a crap job of "improving" the roads. At least for car drivers.

Come on, surely you didn't expect the council to take cyclists safety into account did you?

How can the council do something so obviously dangerous to cyclists?

Not only was it difficult to control my bike, I was showered by chippings and tar from passing vehicles whose drivers couldn't understand a '20 MPH' sign.. :x

Don't worry, it'll be even worse in a week when it starts to bed in and the only safe place to ride is in the wheel tracks left by cars. That'll put you in the perfect place to annoy car drivers but any further left and you'll be in an inch deep pile of chippings where they've been scattered by traffic and overtaking cars will still shower you with loose chippings...

rodgers73

In Wakefield they've been laying it down but then sending a road sweeper over the new section skim off the loose gravel

Beatmaker

bikermart wrote:

Or in A & E

It's not just Cambs where this is happening. We've had it all over cheshire as well. It's a quick and easy way of doing a crap job of "improving" the roads. At least for car drivers.

Come on, surely you didn't expect the council to take cyclists safety into account did you?

It's ridiculous in Chester and West Cheshire. The best of it is the pot holes appeared within a week of the roads being done again, but now I get pinged with stone chips from passing cars, I got hit on my new frame last week and it took a chnk of paint off

R-Point

There is a road near Chester that they have recently 'surface dressed' (the Eccleston to Belgrave road if you know the area) that was previously lovely smooth fast-rolling proper tarmac that must have only been resurfaced within the last few years, and now it's rubbish.

centimani

Yup, Ramsey Mereside toward Ramsey has just been done....whats the deal ? why's it been done everywhere at the same time ?
It is bl00dy dangerous if you're not expecting it, i came round a sharpish bend, quite fast into Nassington village (Northants) a few years ago, to be confronted by tons of chippings right in front of me, it'd slightly heaped up at the side, i had to go straight over it expecting to go off sideways....EEEEEK !!!! Not a sign in sight :x

Superbalicious

September is always the month for re-surfacing for most if not all Local Authorities... temperatures are dropping, reducing the risk of the tar not hardening, but it's not too cold that nothing sticks. It's about as close as you can get to the end of the financial year without the risk of sub-zero temperatures that we have been getting in February/March over the last few years.

As for your position should you fall on loose chippings, the Authority should have posted warning signs with an advisory maximum speed, but as others have said, you ride to the conditions.

All Authorities should leave the surface to settle, normally for a few days or a week, to allow the chippings to fully 'bed in' before using a mechanical sweeper to remove excess chippings, especially from the gutter.

I do sympathise though as one of my routes near Chester has also been done recently... I now know how houses feel when they are pebble-dashed...!!

And no, I don't work for a Council, or at least not any more!

Beatmaker

R-Point wrote:

There is a road near Chester that they have recently 'surface dressed' (the Eccleston to Belgrave road if you know the area) that was previously lovely smooth fast-rolling proper tarmac that must have only been resurfaced within the last few years, and now it's rubbish.

Thats close to where I live in Handbridge, its awful.

keef66

Most of my local loops have been done recently. It's worse if you ride with mudguards with minimal clearances. The chippings adhere to the tyre and scrape round the underside of the guard, sometimes several times before being dislodged. The first casualty was my rear tyre. OK, it was coming to the end of it's useful life anyway, but a couple of outings on the resurfaced stuff shredded what was left of the rubber and left exposed carcase for most of the contact strip. Then on Sunday an unusual noise turned out to be because the rear guard had become detached from it's rearmost mounting because the rivets had been ground away from below.

negativelycra

bikermart wrote:

Or in A & E

It's not just Cambs where this is happening. We've had it all over cheshire as well. It's a quick and easy way of doing a crap job of "improving" the roads. At least for car drivers.

Come on, surely you didn't expect the council to take cyclists safety into account did you?

For those of us with decent cars, trust me daft loose chippings are the worst thing in the world. Even if I drive slow, some other noob will hack past in their snotter and chip my paint - think of it in exactly the same way as a couple of chips to a carbon headtube, it makes you sad.

Ref. where you stand legally, same as all. Ride / drive to the conditions, not the speed limit.

bazzer2

Just a quick note to all those riding on recently dressed roads:

Tighten your cleat bolts

I lost one last night, I reckon likely caused by vibrations on these rough surfaces.