How to fix a road

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 Pothole repairs 'could cost £13bn' says Labour

According to this article on the BBC News website the roads of Britain are in a right state, I'm not doubting that, but the figure of £13 Billion sounds like an awful lot of money.

I'm sure the local authorities have done their research and got their quotes, but that is a hell of a lot of tarmac, How much road needs repairing? how much does it cost to fill in a pothole? We're going to ignore the motorways for this because they aren't managed by local authorities. Here are the numbers:

DFT statistics on UK Roads

The total road length in Great Britain in 2010:
	Miles	kilometers	meters
Dual Carriageways	4,938	7946.94	7946940
Single Carriageways	24,123	38822.21	38822205
B roads	18,729	30141.4	30141403
C Roads	52,700	84812.43	84812428
Unclassified	142,384	229144.8	229144836
Total	242,874	390,868	390,867,812

How many potholes are there? In the UK, there’s an average of one road defect for every 110 metres of road.

This news article says there is one pothole every 120 yards on England's roads which is 109.7 meters, so that's pretty much the same.

How much does resurfacing cost? According to this government report The total cost of road renewals activity per square metre of resurfacing is £89

Lets assume its not just the area of the pothole itself that needs resurfacing, we'll do a proper job and allow for the whole section of road, in both lanes.

How wide are the roads? The European carriageway width for a two-way road is 7 meters, lets assume dual carriageways are twice that width and that all the single carriageway roads are 7 meters (which they aren't)

	meters of road requiring repair	surface area	cost to repair
Dual Carriageways	72244.91	1011428.78	£90,017,156
Single Carriageways	352929.14	2470503.96	£219,874,852
B roads	274012.75	1918089.28	£170,709,946
C Roads	771022.07	5397154.51	£480,364,751
Unclassified	2083134.87	14581944.11	£1,297,793,026
Total	3,553,344	25,379,121	£2,258,741,731

Hang on a minute... £2.3 Billion? That's quite a bit less than £13 billion, and my figure assumes all minor roads are the standard 7m width and we're going to resurface the entire section of road where there's a pothole!

If they only repair the area of the pothole (lets assume each pothole is 1 square meter) that figure comes down to £322,677,390!

There's a bit of a gap between the figures, my total is almost 6 times smaller which means either:

It actually costs £489 per square meter of road

There is one pothole every 20 meters of non-motorway road in the UK, or

The people they are contracting are doing such a rubbish job they have to fill in each pothole at least 5 times.

I must have got something wrong, lets try this again in case I've got my maths completely wrong on the cost to resurface the road:

There are 390,867,812 meters of non-motorway roads in the UK

There is one pothole per 110 meters of road so there's about 3.5 million potholes.

This calculation means local councils are telling us that each pothole is going to cost £3,771 to fix!

Unless I'm missing something huge (please correct me if I have!) something is very wrong in local government.