Like most York residents, I searched for my own street when the council recently put out the list of roads it plans to repair in the next year.

I was confident it would be there – it is a short road with more than 50 potholes.

In places they are so thick even cats have to slalom their way through.

But no, it wasn’t there.

Apparently my road isn’t bad compared to other roads. In which case I dread to think what they are like and whether they have any road surface at all.

To make it worse, a road next to mine which to my eye was in better condition got completely resurfaced earlier this year and is now as smooth as smooth can be.

City of York Council is happy to talk about their pioneering pothole sensor techniques and how they assess streets to ensure those most in need of repair get priority, so I assume the council knows all about the 50-plus potholes in my street and exactly where they are.

Why then are they not repairing them?

It is a question that residents on many a York street must be asking themselves because I cannot believe that my road is the only collection of potholes not on the list of roads to be repaired.

After searching the list in vain, I went out to check that the potholes in my street really are there and I hadn’t imagined them .

I noted that some of them are next to previous patches and that most of the patches themselves are bleeding gravel and bits of tarmac at the edges.

My street is not unique in this.

Walmgate, where I am writing this, has a trough along one side of the carriageway.

The worst of the trough was repaired last year, but now I see that part of the repair is itself sagging down and the sections that weren’t repaired are getting worse.

I remember another road adjacent to my home street that was completely resurfaced some years ago – only for the workmen to have to go back within weeks because new cracks were starting to appear.

You don’t have to go far in York to find a repair that itself is falling apart or has its own pothole.

This cannot be blamed entirely on the recent winter. Road repairs should last more than a couple of winters, otherwise, what’s the point of doing them?

Some of the patches in my road were made in the last couple of years – which is maybe why it isn’t on the repair list this time round.

It is probably marked in a council file somewhere as “repaired”.

It is not.

All the council did was the equivalent of papering over cracks.

It didn’t tackle the cause of the potholes, just as in Walmgate, the repairs didn’t tackle the reason for the sagging carriageway, the workmen just plonked some asphalt on top of it, rather like a woman plastering make-up over shadows under the eyes.

Last month we learnt that York has the worst minor roads in the country with 18 per cent of them needing repairs between 2016 and 2017.

That includes every road except the A-roads.

The year before the same figure was five per cent.

What happened that only affected York roads?

The council can’t blame the weather for that because weather isn’t that selective.

As for saying it’s because more potholes are being reported because of its pioneering pothole sensor, is the council really saying that its roads were just as bad before 2016 and it didn’t notice?

Perhaps the answer lies in the quality of the road repairs.

What controls does the council use to ensure that their contractors or staff do a proper job?

Do the officers actually check potholes a few months after they are repaired to see that that they are still intact and make the workmen redo them at no extra cost if not – in other words what any householder would do if they had their driveway done.

Do they compare potholes records through the years to see if problems repeat in the same place?

From the evidence of the streets, I fear that whatever checks and controls they use, they are not enough.

Is your road as bad as mine - or worse? Let me know in the comments below.