The Secretary of State for Transport Mark Harper, was given a live demonstration of a machine which is helping fix Britain’s roads and help contribute towards ending the ‘scourge’ of potholes.
Mr Harper was shown the JCB Pothole Pro during a visit to the company’s Derbyshire engine plant and saw for himself how the machine repairs a pothole in less than eight minutes – four times quicker than standard methods. The demonstration came just days after the company announced it had won its biggest order yet for 50 Pothole Pros from one of the country’s largest hirers, Dawsongroup, for deployment with councils and contractors up and down the country.
Mr Harper said: “Potholes is an issue that gets raised a lot by my constituents and raised with me as Secretary of State by lots of colleagues in Parliament and that is why we put in place £5 billion over this spending review period, specifically for local authorities to pay for local road resurfacing, including pothole maintenance. That should give them the confidence to plan and to have a proper strategy to improve the quality of the roads they are responsible for. It means they should take the time and the trouble to think about how effectively they’re going to turn that money into improved roads and innovative solutions, like the one we’ve seen here today with the Pothole Pro.”
Local authority data shows the JCB Pothole Pro can complete a pothole repair in less than eight minutes, four times quicker than standard methods and equivalent to 700 potholes per month. With a 40km/h travel speed, the machine can also rapidly relocate between sites without additional transport costs. The Pothole Pro can prepare up to 250m2 of roadway in a single shift, or 5,000m3 per month and allows the contractor or local authority to cut the defect, crop the edges and clean the hole with one machine – mechanising jobs traditionally done by pothole gangs and delivering up to a 50% cut in daily costs, according to JCB.
