Devon residents to be asked to volunteer to fill their own potholes in.

[fucthest8]

No, it comes naturally to me. Anyway, what's your answer?

My answer is "yes" obviously, because that is so very clearly what I was saying, I can't believe that you had to ask, clearly when I wonder what the fuck happens to all the money that the government spends and then draw attention to the fact my username is a text speak version of FUCK THE STATE, clearly, I approve of the cuts, it's just so blatantly obvious.

What was your point?


E2A: Also, in case that was not clear enough, I did not mean "yes". I was being sarcastic. I really think "no". Just in case. It makes no sense to cut local government funding, yet the taxes remain the same. Are you with me now?

 

[Dr_Herbz]

Anyone who fills in a pothole is facilitating the sacking of workers, and is no better, nay, worse than a scab.
Report the hole to the council and if it isn't filled within a few days, have an accident in it and sue them.

 

[Wilf]

My answer is "yes" obviously, because that is so very clearly what I was saying, I can't believe that you had to ask, clearly when I wonder what the fuck happens to all the money that the government spends and then draw attention to the fact my username is a text speak version of FUCK THE STATE, clearly, I approve of the cuts, it's just so blatantly obvious.

What was your point?

My point is that most people with any kind of radical anti-state politics are able to distinguish between the necessary functions the state carries out in the here and now, whilst working on alternatives and building resistance to capital. They are certainly able to avoid crass 'I'm not paying my taxes for that... its all comfy well paid pen pushers... form filling.... politcal correctness gone mad' positions.

 

[SikhWarrioR]

I'd fill in the pothole by work myself only under the condition that I am supplied with a tarmac mix with an aggregate content made from the splintered and ground bones of the Taxpayer's Alliance people and any newspaper proprietor/editor that has uncritically regurgitated their press releases.

Also add anyone stupid enough to be a member of or vote for the conservatives, fib-dimocrats or ukip

 

[fucthest8]

And pray tell, where did I go for the

'I'm not paying my taxes for that... its all comfy well paid pen pushers... form filling.... politcal correctness gone mad'

option? I was asking where the money gets spent.

 

[Wilf]

And pray tell, where did I go for the



option? I was asking where the money gets spent.

On the last page you quote, with seeming approval, someone saying we shouldn't pay them any road taxes - and at the top of this page you said you agreed with the cuts.
Try this:
http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/amusing-simplistic-arguments.328175/

 

[fucthest8]

On the last page you quote, with seeming approval, someone saying we shouldn't pay them any road taxes - and at the top of this page you said you agreed with the cuts.
Try this:
http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/amusing-simplistic-arguments.328175/

Oh my. Oh my oh my. You just ... aren't worth it.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Correct me if I'm wrong but it's a £1bn backlog, not annual cost. For all we know the damage has been accumulating for a long time.

This is in the OP:

Devon boasts the largest highway network in the UK and costs an estimated £1bn each year to maintain.

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

So let's say it goes ahead and the good people of Devon volunteer to fill in potholes. Then some unlucky pedestrian or similar breaks their ankle in a "filled" pothole that wasn't filled enough..or whatever. Who is responsible? Is the council fully responsible or will they say it's the fault of an "unnamed" volunteer?

The plan is full of holes...

 

[likesfish]

You need kit and some training in how to use it plus insurance and somebody I assume has to inspect the work,
Although Brighton council apprantly just grabs randoms off the street because they make really rubbish repairs plus they managed to fuck up laying a cycle lane on the seafront

 

[Zapp Brannigan]

Just business as usual in this country, every cunt wants a slice of the pie.

Roads dep. at the council want a payment to report the pot hole, Inspection dep. want a payment to check it needs filling, planning want a payment to make sure its done properly, maintanance then want a payment to put it on the list. In the end theres no money to get it done.

Loads of chiefs sat behind desks justifying their jobs, no one acactually out in the rain doing the work.

Easy there Captain Daily Express. Highway inspector / area surveyor picks up the pothole on the scheduled inspection regime (or on a tip from the public) and issues directly to the maintenance contractor. Too many chiefs has got nothing to do with pothole repairs.

I have issues with public work being contracted out instead of being part of the public service (where I work used to have a far more efficient in house maintenance team) but better economists than I have run the numbers, there is an argument for cross-boundary shared services in terms of shared plant, materials and warehousing costs. Different issue, I digress.

Pothole repairs, or lack of, boils down to lack of money, plain and simple. So, this Devon example is a straight admission that this austerity bollocks is just that - public money is no longer about public services, it's turning real money from real people into numbers on a purely theoretical balance sheet. Cheers, capitalism!

 

[Zapp Brannigan]

Dp

 

[agricola]

Pothole repairs, or lack of, boils down to lack of money, plain and simple. So, this Devon example is a straight admission that this austerity bollocks is just that - public money is no longer about public services, it's turning real money from real people into numbers on a purely theoretical balance sheet. Cheers, capitalism!

To blame it all on austerity does tend to miss the point a bit - Devon CC have been complaining about cuts to the road maintenance budget since at least 2002, and have had cuts since 1992. As it is, the DoT have seen very little of the money that motorists generate for the Exchequer - who have been happy to rake it in but who have only splashed the cash when PFI is involved.

There is also the likelyhood that maintenance budgets were easy to cut (and bonuses easier to achieve) when things didnt obviously need maintenance - something that (for instance) Railtrack was guilty of on more than one occasion, and which left the same sort of massive backlog when it became obvious what condition the system was in (or rather when it became obvious that Railtrack had no idea what state the system was in).

 

[Lo Siento.]

To blame it all on austerity does tend to miss the point a bit - Devon CC have been complaining about cuts to the road maintenance budget since at least 2002, and have had cuts since 1992. As it is, the DoT have seen very little of the money that motorists generate for the Exchequer - who have been happy to rake it in but who have only splashed the cash when PFI is involved.

There is also the likelyhood that maintenance budgets were easy to cut (and bonuses easier to achieve) when things didnt obviously need maintenance - something that (for instance) Railtrack was guilty of on more than one occasion, and which left the same sort of massive backlog when it became obvious what condition the system was in (or rather when it became obvious that Railtrack had no idea what state the system was in).

Yeah, poor maintenance of infrastructure is a general feature of life in neo-liberal states. A function of spending state money on anything other than subsidies, privatisation and tax breaks being an absolute last resort.

 

[SpookyFrank]

The road to my dad's house (in North Cornwall) has been unadopted by the local authority becuase they can't afford to maintain trillions of windy little lanes that only serve one or two properties.

The south west suffers a lot from these sorts of things. Tourism brings a lot of money to private business but not a great deal to local authorities. Poor Cornwall with it's population of half a million has to pay for the upkeep of roads used by millions of people (and their fucking caravans) every year. Doubling council tax on second homes might help, and even if it doesn't anything that upsets cunts with second homes is worth doing just for the sake of it.

As for calling people scabs, the general public hasn't fired anyone, but for better or worse they do need safe roads to drive on. I volunteer with a local youth club, doing stuff that the council could (and should) be paying someone to do properly, am I a scab too? Or am I just trying to take some responsibility for something?

 

[SpookyFrank]

Devon has the highest total mileage of highways of any county, apparently.

Indeed. Lots of smallish towns and villages scattered over lots of complicated terrain requires lots of very bendy roads.

e2a: Two long stretches of coastline as well, much of it consisting of high cliffs. So instead of one long road along the coast you need a road going down each little valley to each little town in each little bay.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Anyone who fills in a pothole is facilitating the sacking of workers, and is no better, nay, worse than a scab.
Report the hole to the council and if it isn't filled within a few days, have an accident in it and sue them.

Thus giving the remaining council workforce more work to do. Solidarity in action.

Also suing the council is not gonna increase the amount of money they have available to pay their staff is it?

 

[Dr_Herbz]

Thus giving the remaining council workforce more work to do. Solidarity in action.

They can only fill so many holes a day. It's up to them how fast they work.

Also suing the council is not gonna increase the amount of money they have available to pay their staff is it?

No, it won't but maybe it'll make them realise that filling holes should be higher on their list of priorities.

 

[SpookyFrank]

No, it won't but maybe it'll make them realise that filling holes should be higher on their list of priorities.

And they should be closing children's homes to make sure the roads get patched up tout-de-suite?

For reasons I shouldn't have to go into, I'd rather enthusiastic amateurs were filling in potholes than looking after vulnerable kids.

 

[Dr_Herbz]

And they should be closing children's homes to make sure the roads get patched up tout-de-suite?

Yes, that's what I said.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Yes, that's what I said.

No, you didn't say what priorities should be shunted down the list to make way for potholes. The council should just sort it out right? With money they pulled out of their arseholes.

 

[Dr_Herbz]

No, you didn't say what priorities should be shunted down the list to make way for potholes. The council should just sort it out right? With money they pulled out of their arseholes.

I'm not their accountant.

 

[SpookyFrank]

I'm not their accountant.

But you're happy to tell them what their priorities should be?

 

[BigTom]

On the one hand (and I live in Devon), part of me would be really happy to, say, help fix my own road/area, cause, you know, I live in it, and I'd be happy to be neighbourly and such.

On the other hand

The council has already slashed its budget by £18.5 million since 2010 but needs to save a further £3.4million in line with the government's austerity cuts.

and

We're paying nearly £60bn in motoring taxes and if that's not enough for them to do their job then maybe we shouldn't pay them at all. It's bloody ridiculous.

just leaves me once again wondering where all the fucking money goes. Sixty billion, is that right? Which leads me back again, as always, to my username.

<waits for Citizen66 to find some way to make this mean that I'm a Tory>

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...ces-13bn-black-hole-from-fuel-duty-slump.html

Telegraph article from 2012 says £38bn from fuel duty and VED. Wikipedia says in 2009 29bn + 5bn = 34bn. Add onto that VAT paid on fuel and new/used cars & parts, and income tax paid on company cars (and probably some other taxes which you can just about link directly to motoring) and you probably do approach 60bn.
As to where it's spent, well it's spent everywhere, because the UK doesn't hypothecate taxes, so all taxes go into one central pot, out of which everything is paid for. So it's spent mostly on Pensions and the NHS. Like any tax.
If it were going just to pay for the cost to the taxpayer of motoring, then you'd not only have the DfT and local councils' budgets, you also have huge costs to the NHS and emergency services both from crashes and from the public health issues around air pollution.

 

[Dr_Herbz]

But you're happy to tell them what their priorities should be?

I'm happy to state that the public shouldn't be doing a job that the council should be paying workers to do.

 

[SpookyFrank]

I'm happy to state that the public shouldn't be doing a job that the council should be paying workers to do.

And to call the public scabs if they do decide to do that job, because they're aware that their local authority isn't made of money and cutting jobs in road maintenance might have been unavoidable if other services were to be maintained. Or even if they think the council has made the wrong call, but they realise that the call will not be unmade, the workers have already been sacked and the only part of the situation they have any control over is whether or not the dangerous pothole remains in their street.

Sacked road workers do not benefit from or depend upon the existence of potholes, therefore repairing said potholes cannot harm those workers.

 

[SpookyFrank]

If you saw someone fixing a pothole, would you go up to him and yell 'scab' to his face? Or are you only comfortable making such ridiculous blanket assertions about people from the comfort and safety of an internet bulletin board?

 

[Dr_Herbz]

Sacked road workers do not benefit from or depend upon the existence of potholes, therefore repairing said potholes cannot harm those workers.

What about the workers who are sacked next year because the public are doing their job?

 

[Dr_Herbz]

If you saw someone fixing a pothole, would you go up to him and yell 'scab' to his face? Or are you only comfortable making such ridiculous blanket assertions about people from the comfort and safety of an internet bulletin board?

I'd gladly explain why I thought it was wrong.
Would you explain to the sacked road worker that it's OK that he's on the dole, because someone will do his job for free?

 

[SpookyFrank]

What about the workers who are sacked next year because the public are doing their job?

Road workers do plenty of jobs that the general public wouldn't have the tools or know-how to do.