News / Transport
£10.3m to be spent on Bristol’s crumbling roads
The condition of roads in Bristol will still get worse despite millions of pounds due to be invested in repairing surfaces.
Bristol City Council officials forecast that an extra £9m a year is needed to prevent the overall state of the roads across the city from gradually declining.
Cavernous potholes will be all too familiar to anyone who drives, cycles, scoots or gets a bus in Bristol.
Dodging potholes in a car is increasingly difficult in some sections of roads while bumpy bus journeys can sometimes feel like riding a goat scrambling up the side of the Avon Gorge.
Councillors on the transport policy committee voted to approve spending £10.3m over the next five years on maintaining the city’s roads on Thursday.
But they were warned this would not be enough, although similar problems are facing many other parts of the country too.
Roads across our city are blighted by potholes
Shaun Taylor, head of highways, said: “The investment we’re putting in is great.
“We’re using the most efficient preventative maintenance techniques, as recommended by the government. But the reality is the investment isn’t meeting the depreciation.
“So while we’re slowing up, and this year we actually managed to steady it – the figures have come in that we’ve maintained a steady ship – that’s quite an achievement, considering that the life-cycle modelling shows that we should be investing an extra £9m a year.
“And I’ve got £3m this year. But that’s not unusual across the entire country.”
“The council is responsible for managing and maintaining 751 miles or 1,209 kilometres of roads, as well as footpaths and cycling routes, bridges, subways, lamp posts, drains and traffic lights.
“Around 20,000 square metres of roads are resurfaced every year, where the existing surface is removed and replaced.
“Around 200,000 square metres of road are surface-dressed every year.
“This involved combining a layer of aggregate and a layer of binder, to form a running surface which is then laid over the existing surface.
“Preventative maintenance also includes applying slurry seal and pre-patching.
“Thousands of potholes are filled each year, with the latest figure from 2024-25 totalling 4,398.”
Bristol’s crumbling road network has received a £10.3m funding boost to be spent over the next five years
Liberal Democrat councillor Nicholas Coombes said: “Maintenance is well worth investing in for safety, reduction of noise, and it helps with our modal shift to sustainable means.
“I welcome the investment but investment has gone up for every year for each of the last five years.
“Our road condition gets worse every year. We spend more and we get less for our money.”
………………………………………..
This article is published as part of the BBC-funded Local Democracy Reporting Service. Another website in Bristol is making its readers pay for LDRS stories but at Bristol24/7 we will never have a paywall. If you want to support our independent journalism, please consider becoming a member from just £3 per month.
………………………………………..
Splitting the condition of roads into green, amber and red, the percentage of roads marked as green is dropping.
In 2020, 28.9 per cent of A roads were marked as green, dropping to 21.5 per cent in 2024, according to a local highways maintenance transparency report last year.
Over the same period, the number of B roads marked as green fell from 14.4 per cent to 9.8 per cent.
The majority of the funding for road maintenance comes from the Department for Transport, rather than the council.
The national pothole crisis is partly due to British winters getting wetter, as heavy rainfall damages roads more than before, as well as rising costs for materials to repair surfaces.
All photos: Betty Woolerton
Read next:
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
