9 comments by 2 or more people

1. Steve Rumsby

   Thanks for making us aware of this. I’ve just used it to report the potholes around the pedestrian crossing between Westwood campus and University House, and some break-up around manhole covers on Westwood Heath Road. Let’s see what happens…

   For reference, the reports are: Westwood Heath Road and Pedestrian Crossing

   30 Jan 2007, 12:00

2. Steve Rumsby

   I’ve just had acknowledgment from the CTC that my two reports have been submitted to Coventry City Council. Let’s see how long it takes for something to happen…

   01 Feb 2007, 17:25

3. £14,000 paid out in pothole compensation by Coventry Council.

   See iccoventry and search on “pothole compensation”

   01 Feb 2007, 18:33

4. Steve Rumsby

   And I’ve just been out (yes, in the rain) and cycled past the Westwood Heath Road pothole actually being fixed. And it looks like they’ve made a very good job of it, too. I look forward to cycling over it tomorrow to check:-)

   The other one hasn’t been touched yet. Maybe they’ll move on to that one next…?

   It only took 4 weeks!

   28 Feb 2007, 13:19

5. Steve Rumsby

   The second one was finally fixed on Thursday, a week later.

   So, in theory this thing works, but in practice it takes a while. I think my next few I’ll report directly via Coventry’s own online pothole reporting form and see if that works any better.

   11 Mar 2007, 08:14

6. I suspect the thinking behind the CTC scheme included the following aims:

   • to spur local authorities who haven’t got a proper pothole reporting, and tracking scheme into having one
   • to help where the reporter of the fault didn’t know which local authority to contact
   • to “name & shame” local authorities who are particularly bad in fixing holes. In that respect it’s a bit like Warrington cycle campaign’s farcility of the month.

   If people only report holes to the local authority it’s not very easy to discover how bad a particular authority is.

   11 Mar 2007, 09:36

7. Steve Rumsby

   I did wonder about that last one. Do you know if there any plans to put that sort of information on the site? The “Mean Time to Fix” for each authority would be interesting. It is hard to get that sort of information from the site as it is. From browsing through the reports, my impression is that Coventry is quite low down the league table from a responsiveness point of view, and I’d love to point my local councillor if he could see the same thing easily, without having to browse through pages and pages of pothole reports.

   11 Mar 2007, 11:19

8. Steve,

   I’ve passed your query to the designer.

   I’m not sure the tracking the mean time to repair would be a good idea, as the exact time of repair would be hard to accurately ascertain. Perhaps the proportion still outstanding after a certain period might be a better indicator?

   11 Mar 2007, 13:00

9. The designer writes that he does expect to add statistics, but finding accurate and useful ones will be difficult. They are currently waiting for the site to settle down a bit, and for the highway authorities to get used to it, before adding any enhancements.

   11 Mar 2007, 21:53