APPARENTLY, if you want a pothole-free driving experience in Stonehaven, you should head to William Mackie Road and savour the smoothness. Ramsay Road would be a close second and Hamewith Drive looks not too shoddy either.
Meanwhile Glenury residents are either afflicted by a rash of particularly bad potholes – or they are aware of the Fix My Street and are good at using it. Fix My Street lets you report problems, request updates and see a map of all reported potholes along with other street related problems such as lighting, flooding, speeding and empty grit bins.
The website/app is easy to use and GPS linked so if you are standing beside the problem then it is accurately mapped. Even better, you can upload a photo of the problem along with descriptive text. In a nanosecond or two, this information is passed to the relevant local authority.
Pitching in on the pothole problem
With Aberdeenshire Council’s Kincardine and Mearns area manager Tim Stephen in the room at this week’s meeting, members of Stonehaven and District Council took their opportunity to seek an explanation for the state of the town’s roads.
They found a sympathetic ear in Mr Stephen, who confessed to having to navigate the tormented tarmacadam on Evan Street in order to get to work. He said the Council’s challenges were two-fold – their capacity to attempt repairs and the weather conditions wreaking havoc across the Shire.
”Undertaken repairs have failed very quickly due to the weather,” he said.
”Once this has improved, we will get back to our prioritised repairs.”
Mr Stephen said the work was prioritised using a model looking first to any possible risk to life presented by a pothole. He contrasted the likely consequence of hitting a defect when driving to Banchory on the Slug Road at 60mph, to the relatively low risk of injury encountered while navigating Evan Street at less than 20mph.
Which is perhaps why the good people of Glenury should carry on weaving their way home.
With the winter weather causing an ever-increasing number of potholes, Mr Stephen encouraged locals to use Fix My Street. He said it was proving very useful to the Council in their awareness of road surface problems .
”We are finding out where the potholes are,” he said.