Superfast solution to city’s potholes - Video and audio transcripts

Councillor Patricia Hetherton, cabinet member for city services: I’m here today to look at our new JCB Pothole Pro in action. We’ve had it a week now. Our teams have learned how to use it. We’re on the roads. The difference this will make is tremendous. This machine is a game-changer and we’ll be able to focus on our potholes and get them done much, much faster.

Having done that, it will release people then to start looking at the pavements, so it will make such a change with the innovative ways of using it, it’s just fantastic.

It has many functions, and so we’re really excited and we hope that people will feel the difference. Neil Cowper, head of highways, Coventry City Council: “This is a machine that JCB have produced and we’d been looking for a way to speed up our pothole repairs in Coventry.

Instead of having guys breaking out the road with breakers, we can get a lot more work done, a lot more potholes filled in Coventry.

Daniel Jenner, JCB PotholePro product specialist: “We’ve been working with Coventry over the last six months.

It’s good to see the machine is working well and it’s good to see they’ve started using it in the community.

There’s three stages to the machine, there’s cut, crop and clean. So we’ve got a planer on the machine which
does the initial cut, so that will cut up dirt 600mm wide and 170mm deep.

We’ve got the crop which is a 400mm cropping tool for cropping the edges of the defect, and then finally we’ve got the clean.

We’ve got a 1.2m brush on the machine which comes in afterwards and cleans up all the spoil.

Councillor Richard Brown, cabinet member for finance: “To me, this is a no-brainer.

We’ve got a backlog of potholes and some of that has built up even worse over COVID.

What this machine does is clear those potholes five times as fast.

As a result of that, it then allows us to put extra resource onto doing other things like the pavements, and I know people talk to me about the state of our roads with potholes, and the state of the pavements, so anything
like this that helps us to do it and clear it five times faster is a sound investment.