West Sussex County Council has repaired almost 40,000 'safety-related' highways defects in the last six months, including a trial of mastic asphalt repairs.
The highway authority said it spent £13m ‘to actively tackle the problem of our deteriorating roads’, in addition to the base budget for the year of £42.8m and £2.1m received from the Department for Transport’s Road Resurfacing Fund.
The county's highways team is working on 'surface treatments and patching, and repairing safety defects across the network’. Between April and September this year this included completing:
- More than 95% of pothole repairs (around18,000) completed using the ‘sides sawn and sealed’ method
- 9,600 pothole repairs covering approximately 10,500 square metres using Velocity jet patchers
- 23,625 square metres worth of small and medium scale patching across 299 jobs
- 4.2 miles of large-scale carriageway patching
- 116 miles of surfacing treatments
The highway authority said it had sought to use long-lasting and cost effective repair techniques, including a three-month trial of mastic asphalt to repair potholes on stretches of 3,000 square metres of road that undergo the most stress, such as junctions.
Joy Dennis, cabinet member for highways and transport, said: ‘As a county, we have one of the most extensive highways networks to monitor and maintain, with over 2,500 miles, or around 4,000km, of roads. This is roughly the same as driving from Chichester to Rome and back.
‘To get our entire network into perfect condition, we would need £400m for the surfacing works alone. We’d also need to carry out a large amount of other structural and drainage works, especially on rural roads, which don’t have the same underlying infrastructure as roads in urban situations do.'
The council added that so far this year it has carried out more than 43,000 gully cleanses.
