Gloucestershire County Council’s plan to spend £100m over four years improving the quality of its roads is already paying off, the highway authority has said.
The authority said that since April, over 25,000 potholes and safety defects have been repaired and 98,000 tonnes of ‘tarmac’ have been used on the county’s roads - ‘equating to 19 Olympic-sized swimming pools’.
A total of 124 roads have been resurfaced and 109,000 gullies were cleared.
The council said that much of this work is funded from the further £100m of spending announced in last year’s budget, which ‘puts Gloucestershire in a position of having the highest levels of investment in county roads ever’.
A spokesperson told Highways that the volume of surfacing material had been calculated using a volume of two and a quarter million litres per pool, and ‘tarmac’ weighing between 2.1 tonnes and 2.2 tonnes per cubic metre.
Cllr Morris (right) with assistant director of highways Kath Haworth
Dom Morris, cabinet member for highways and flooding, said: ‘These are compelling statistics and I hope help to demonstrate that we are working hard to improve the county’s roads, keeping them safe, clear and protecting against flooding.
‘Our priority is to deal with the most dangerous safety issues first, as you would expect. It’s not going to be perfect, but we’re doing as much as we can and we have heard residents when they say they want to see improvements particularly on potholes.’
The council acknowledged that winter will inevitably see an increase in potholes but that it would work hard to keep up with this as well as winter activities, with 85 gritting runs completed in December.
