“Dangerous” Haddington junction repairs completed

A pot-hole plagued junction in Haddington which was labelled “dangerous” and “an accident waiting to happen” by police after a motorcyclist came off their bike and sustained injuries, has had a £64,000 complete rebuild.

Lincolnshire Police’s Specialist Operations tweeted about a series of potholes on the corner of South Hykeham Road and Bridge Road after a motorcyclist “made every attempt to avoid the pothole(s) facing them but unfortunately sustained injuries” in March.

FixMyStreet.com at the time showed multiple reports made at the junction in recent days and going back to the beginning of February with some reporting in excess of 10 to 15 holes.

One report describes the junction as a “a lunar landscape” while others call it “appalling” and “dangerous”.

Lincolnshire County Council promised to patch the road and resurface it by the end of April and, despite further complaints over patching work done in the middle of the month, have now kept to their word.

A spokesman for LCC said: “The junction has had the structural work needed to resolve the issues and was completed ahead of schedule before the end of the month.

“These works for this job cost in the region of £64k because of the amount of structural engineering necessary to repair the area plus the amount of materials used.

“The end result is a junction that is of the standard that we, and everyone who uses the roads in Lincolnshire, expect.”

The repair work took three nights. | Image: Richard Parker/@velohistorian

Cyclist Richard Parker cycles the route regularly and noticed the repairs which took three nights.

He said it seemed to be be a good standard of work.

However, he added: “The main problem historically has been it has deteriorated, holes appear, they patch badly. Then they fill some again and repeat.”

He said more needed to be done to divert HGVs away from the road, including a potential weight limit, and that historically the repairs had been of “poor value” leading to further issues.

He noted it had taken months of complaints and an accident this time round.

“The rest of the Lincolnshire road network needs the same level of investment,” he added.

The original complaint attracted the attention of Mr Pothole, a national campaigner who used it to promote his campaign calling on the government to tackle a national £12.64 billion roads maintenance backlog.

Lincolnshire County Council in recent months has been campaigning, unsuccessfully, for the government to reinstate around £12.5million in lost funding – a slash to the authority’s roads budget of 25%.

The funding equates to around 72,000 potholes left unfilled.

The authority was forced to change its original plans for a 3% tax rise, instead hiking it by 4.99% in response, as well as putting £2.3million of its reserves aside to balance the books.