Winter shake-up for road gritting

Oct 2 2008 by John Rowbotham, Hamilton Advertiser

COUNCILLORS this week approved a shake-up of South Lanarkshire’s winter roads maintenance programme

Roads chiefs say the existing set-up, in which more than two-thirds of the network is gritted as a precaution, has proved “legislatively unworkable, expensive, resource hungry and environmentally inefficient”.

From this winter, 57 per cent of South Lanarkshire’s roads network will undergo precautionary gritting but that will still represent the highest level of service in Scotland.

But the figure is down 13 per cent on the number of South Lanarkshire roads gritted under the existing system.

South Lanarkshire Council’s enterprise committee yesterday (Wednesday) approved the new winter maintenance regime which is expected to save £212,000 a year.

In a report to the committee, enterprise director Iain Urquhart said legislation on the length of time that staff can now work had led to problems when deploying gritter drivers.

He told councillors that under the current winter maintenance programme, 70 per cent of South Lanarkshire roads were gritted as a precaution which compared with the average among Scottish councils of 44 per cent.

The current cost of gritting South Lanarkshire’s 2223km of road is £2.95m compared with the average road maintenance bill among Scottish local authorities of £1.16m.

Mr Urquhart said under the new arrangements minor residential roads with no obvious access problems would be excluded from precautionary treatment as would secondary access to isolated settlements.

He added: “This would reduce precautionary treatment to around 57 per cent of South Lanarkshire’s road network. The remaining 43 per cent would be treated as secondary routes should adverse conditions arise.”

As a result of the change, the number of gritters required would fall from 37 to 33.

Mr Urquhart said they would also increase the number of ice sensors to ensure gritting only takes place when necessary.

Committee chairman Chris Thomson stressed that the new measures would only apply to precautionary gritting.

He said: “If we are told that there is going to be bad weather, we will go out and make sure the roads are gritted, and we will grit 70 per cent of the network as we did before.

“However, we are talking about being more efficient and we will have more ice sensors so we know more about the weather conditions”

SNP councillor Barry Douglas, a member of the enterprise committee, said: “We could understand the rationale behind the proposals but we had concerns about the reduction in the network to be gritted as a precaution.

“We sought and were given assurances that constituents would not see a reduction in road safety as a results of these changes.”