ROAD bosses at Fife Council have railed against the “keyboard warrior mentality” of locals criticising the time it takes to repair potholes.

Service manager Derek Crowe said the demands and expectations placed on workers by the public was “unsustainable”.

His report highlighted growing pressures on road maintenance crews and he called for patience while up to a dozen teams work around the clock to patch up Kingdom highways.

He told a committee meeting last week: “It’s been a very challenging year and during the pandemic we’ve seen a significant upswing in customer demand on the service: contacts, queries, complaints, social media requests, that have been unsustainable.

“We’re needing a light touch because of the huge demand on service colleagues. We need to get rid of this keyboard warrior mentality we have at the moment.

“The volume of correspondence coming into the service has become unsustainable and the backlog then puts stress on the staff themselves.”

Road budgets in Fife have shrunk by a third over the last decade but the areas of responsibility have grown, meaning officers are having to reassess how and when they fix defects in the road.

Potholes are assessed under a new “risk-based” system to assess how urgently patching is needed.

While this will ensure the most dangerous defects are repaired immediately – the most critical will be patched within 24 hours – those that are not considered an immediate hazard may not be fixed for up to a year, or even longer.

Council bosses say this will mean fewer rush jobs and better, longer lasting repairs – but the pandemic and winter weather have created a backlog.

His report shows that while 91 per cent of all “critical” fixes between September and February were fixed within 24 hours, 21 per cent of “high” priority repairs, the next stage down, were not addressed within a target of five days.

Mr Crowe added: “The timing wasn’t brilliant since the pandemic was in full swing but we did our best to continue with aiming for first-and-only complete repairs.

“Stage one [critical] and two [high] complaints are very time consuming for senior staff to deal with at a time when staff are affected by absence. It was a crisis and it still is a crisis situation that we are dealing with.

“The last three months, with Covid and the lockdown, and the two months of really freaky weather, Storm Darcy in February, a week of flooding, two weeks of snow, have all taken the team doing pothole repairs away. They are the same team driving gritters around Fife.”

Despite the build-up of potholes, a recent freedom of information request found that just four out of 367 of pothole damage claims made to Fife Council in 2020 were successful.

Despite the challenges, Mr Crowe is confident that the problems will be sorted in the long-term.

“Our strapline is to vanquish potholes in Fife and I’m hoping by the time we approach next winter the situation will be greatly different,” he concluded.

Councillors praised the “frank and honest” appraisal of roads maintenance and appealed to the public to curb their expectations in light of the growing pressures services are under.

Cllr Tim Brett, who requested the report, said: “I reckon half of my casework relates to transportation. It’s a huge amount and it’s hugely important, and public expectations are high and getting higher.

“The last 12 months have been very challenging to say the least.”