It doesn’t matter which way you turn in Sussex at the moment – left, right, or tentatively edging forward past a set of temporary traffic lights that haven’t changed for six minutes – you will find roadworks.
Cones sprout overnight like an invasive species. Fresh tarmac is dug up days after being laid. A road closes, reopens, then closes again, usually just as you’ve learned the diversion – and the signs never quite explain why.
Ask most drivers how bad Britain’s roads are and you’ll get a hollow laugh, possibly followed by a story involving a pothole, a cracked alloy wheel and an insurance excess that feels deeply unfair.
Then you look at the official figures and see that, apparently, only around 17% of local roads are in “poor condition”.
Seventeen per cent. Really?
If that were true, Sussex drivers wouldn’t feel like they’re navigating an assault course designed by someone who actively dislikes suspension systems. So what’s going on?
When “poor” doesn’t mean what you think it means
The first thing to understand is that government and industry figures use a very specific definition of “poor condition”. It doesn’t mean unpleasant to drive on. It doesn’t mean full of cracks, patches and shallow potholes. It means the road is structurally close to failure – essentially on its last legs.
In other words, a road can be rough, uneven, patched within an inch of its life and actively damaging your car, yet still not count as “poor” in the official statistics.
Large parts of the network fall into a grey area: not good, not quite bad enough to trigger major reconstruction, but steadily deteriorating. These roads don’t show up in the headline numbers – but drivers feel every inch of them.
So when officials say, “Only 17% are in poor condition,” what they really mean is, “Only 17% are about to fall apart completely.” Which is rather like a dentist saying most of your teeth are fine because only a few need extracting, while ignoring the fact the rest are sensitive, cracked and making chewing a misery.
It’s not that the figures are technically false. It’s that they’re comfortably narrow.
The great illusion of coordination
Then there’s the question every motorist asks while staring at an empty trench at lunchtime: Why on earth isn’t this coordinated?
Why does the road get dug up by one company, resurfaced, and then dug up again three weeks later by someone else? Why do councils appear powerless to stop the chaos? Here’s the uncomfortable truth: in many cases, they are.
Local councils are responsible for most roads, but they do not control who digs them up. Utility companies – water, gas, electricity, telecoms – have legal rights to access the highway. If a pipe bursts or a cable fails, they can declare an emergency and start work immediately, without waiting for permission.
From the public’s point of view, it looks like chaos. From the council’s point of view, it is chaos – legally sanctioned chaos.
Councils do try to coordinate planned works. They hold meetings, issue permits, attempt to line up resurfacing with utility upgrades. Some even fine companies for overrunning. But the penalties are often so small that it’s cheaper for utilities to pay them than to radically change how they work.
Emergency works, meanwhile, blow any carefully planned schedule out of the water. And emergencies happen more often when infrastructure is old, overstretched and under-maintained – which brings us neatly back to the state of the roads.
The funding gap no one likes talking about
Local road maintenance has been quietly underfunded for years. Councils are expected to maintain vast networks with budgets that barely stretch to reactive repairs, let alone long-term renewal.
Resurfacing a road properly is expensive. Patching it is cheaper. So patching becomes the default. Over time, patches fail faster, water gets in, utilities dig, repairs multiply – and the road enters a permanent state of “just about holding together”.
Official statistics don’t capture this spiral very well. They measure end-stage failure, not prolonged decline. Which makes the problem look smaller on paper than it feels behind the wheel.
This is where public trust starts to erode. Drivers are told the situation isn’t that bad, while experiencing daily evidence to the contrary. It creates the sense that someone, somewhere, is marking their own homework.
Why it feels worse than ever
There’s another factor too: visibility.
Roadworks today are more intrusive, more frequent and more disruptive. Modern health and safety standards require larger sites, longer closures and more signage. Even small jobs take up more road space and last longer than they used to.
Add ageing infrastructure, utility upgrades, broadband rollouts, climate-related repairs and a backlog of neglected maintenance, and suddenly the cones feel endless.
To the public, it looks like incompetence. In reality, it’s a system creaking under decades of underinvestment, legal complexity and competing responsibilities.
So who do we blame?
Not the individual workers, who are usually doing exactly what they’re told in difficult conditions.
Not even councils, who are stuck coordinating a jigsaw puzzle while half the pieces can legally move whenever they like.
The real issue is structural. A system that:
- measures road quality in ways ordinary drivers don’t recognise,
- underplays deterioration until it becomes a crisis,
- gives utilities strong rights but weak incentives to coordinate,
- and starves local roads of the long-term funding needed to stop the cycle.
Until that changes, we’ll keep driving on roads that are “not poor” but feel dreadful, through roadworks that look pointless but are often unavoidable.
A final thought from the driver’s seat
If it feels like the roads are worse than we’re being told, that’s because – in lived, everyday terms – they are.
Statistics may say one thing. Suspension springs, wheel rims and shaken patience say another.
And until the numbers start reflecting the reality beneath our tyres, the cones will keep multiplying, the frustration will keep rising, and drivers will continue asking the same question at every set of temporary lights:
How did it get this bad – and why does no one seem to admit it?
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