If there’s one story of which Bankstone News will literally never grow tired, that story is surely potholes.
A pothole, as regular readers will recall and, indeed, any good dictionary will tell you, is a deep natural declivity formed by the erosion of rock, and in particular by the action of water.
Which may be all fine and well in the context of some picturesque and unfrequented wilderness. The problem is: an estimated 112% of the world’s potholes are currently located on the UK’s public highways.
A brutally unsettling press release issued this week by Alcoholics Anonymous revealed that the number of insurance claims traceable to the overabundance of potholes along this country’s designated motor vehicle-ways (DMVs) has risen five fold since new year’s eve.
Specifically, there were, the AA contends, an average 33 claims a week during Nov and Dec 2013, compared with a wapping 173 claims a week in Jan and Feb this year, with around two thousand private cars “damaged sufficiently seriously by potholes, to make it worth making a claim” in “the first few weeks” of the year alone.
In October 2013 29% of AA members reported their local roads to be in a “terrible condition,” a percentage that had risen to 40% by March this year. At least one commentator has gone further still, describing the condition of roads round his way to Bankstone News as “a ****ing joke, Mate”
The AA’s patron in chief King Edmund seized upon these shocking findings to argue that “Britain’s roads are ill-prepared for the economic recovery and unfit for purpose for many road users”, refraining only from declaring them officially “broken”.
“Bad surfaces with millions of potholes can cause death and injury,” he noted uncontroversially, adding: “and lead to expensive damage and insurance claims.”
This is surely true.
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