Shoddy road repairs

Of course, although nobody comes to fix most of the rubbish road surfaces, sometimes when they do try to repair them, they make such a shoddy job of it that they probably shouldn't have bothered but they'll have to return soon to make a proper job of the repair.

The photo below is of the A232 on Duppas Hill Road (taken on Wed 11 March '09), a TfL road, not a Croydon Council one! This is what I call a "tarmac which fell off the back of a lorry" repair. A bunch of highway cowboys (but expensively hired by TfL) turn up with a lorry, cone off a bit of road, dump some tarmac in the holes/hazards, press it down a bit with a small steamroller (pushed by hand - and which also arrived on the back of their truck), hoist the steamroller back onto their truck, remove the cones, and drive off to their next shoddily-performed assignment. TfL should be ashamed of themselves. This sort of repair may not cost or delay traffic as much as a proper job, but it's never going to last as long and they'll have to keep coming back to do these useless repairs.
The photo below is of a large hole around a sunken manhole cover in Whytecliffe Road South in Purley (taken on Fri 13 March '09). They have attempted to repair this with some tarmac but they have covered over the manhole cover so it can't be seen whose it is (water, gas, electric, etc.) and is probably difficult to lift/remove. The patched surface around the manhole cover wasn't done properly so it has sunk again with all the buses and other heavy vehicles which pass over it (you can see a bus at a Bus Stand in the photo). You can also see the cycle lane on the LHS of the photo, but because of debris in the cycle lane (near where the photo was taken from) sensible cyclists will be nearer the middle of this one-way road until they need to swerve left to avoid the abortion in the photo!