Indeed, a fair bit of it being done round here too. It's no fun riding on it on a motorbike, let me tell you.
The really dangerous stuff is that very fine crushed granite that is used to top dress the random repair patches. Avoid at all costs if you can, it's like riding on ball bearings.
Plus this type of surface (mainly when new, but still for a long time afterwards) is great for pinging up stones and ruining paintwork and windscreens, especially when i****s travel well above the temporary speed limits for the week (urgh) or so after the surface is 'laid'.
Councils boast about it also being 'harder wearing' and 'far cheaper' than proper tarmac surfaces, but Herts CC top-dressed the A505 near me and it has already badly deteriorated after just two years. Why - because they never fix the underlying causes, which are damaged sub-surfaces (concrete) and/or damaged tarmac, where they mostly just put the same top-dressed chippings to replace the worn tarmac (which was worn because the sub-surface hasn't been repaired.
Often the root cause is poor drainage (whether none at all, not placed at actual low points or not unblocked [often by material blown in from nearby farmer's fields]), leading to standing water in winter, which freezes/unfreezes and rapidly destroys the roadway. Also bad in underpasses/frost hollows under bridges - especially with the aforementioned drainage issues.
I suspect they end up spending more money fixing badly damaged roads and top-dressing every few years, rather than getting to the root of the problem. ironically, because top-dressed / chipped surfaces are often badly laid with lots of loose chippings, they end up in drains, blockding them, which causes water to build up...
I certainly wouldn't want to cycle on them either.
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