Oxfordshire County Council have published an update on highways maintenance for the summer of 2018.
Some useful information is below:
- The road network managed by Oxfordshire County Council is 2,994 miles long.
- The network is made up of: A roads (15%); B roads (10%), and C or unclassified roads (75%). The high proportion of C and unclassified roads, which are often not built to modern standards and in rural locations, makes highway maintenance a major challenge.
- The A34, M40 and A43 are managed and maintained by Highways England.
- The total budget for carriageway repairs for 2018/19 is around £11m.
- It would cost around £250m to bring the network to an acceptable standard, and then would require an annual capital investment of £21m to keep them at that standard through resurfacing.
- In addition, £5m a year is needed for regular maintenance (gulley cleaning, pot hole repair, grip cutting, siding out etc).
- Oxfordshire has fewer miles of road assessed as ‘good’ than the national average, but fewer in a ‘poor’ condition. We also have a higher percentage in ‘fair’ condition than the national average.
Maintenance progress
- We currently have 18 crews working on our roads – the largest number we have ever used. In the summer, we would previously have had six.
- We have doubled our minor patching crews from two to four, and also doubled our minor works gangs from two to four.
- We have recently bought a new Dragon patching machine. We now have two Dragons in Oxfordshire, with a third shared with two other highway authorities.
- We have dealt with 23,809 potholes since January 2018. This is 64% up on last year and equates to fixing and average of 3,968 potholes a month.
- Pothole fixing peaked in March with 5,146 being repaired.
- We have dealt with a total of 28,358 defects (potholes, drains, damaged signs etc) in total since January 2018.
- Again repairs overall peaked in March with 5,786 being completed.
- We are doing more ‘saw-cut’ repairs on A and B roads. This is a longer-lasting but more expensive method, but is not suitable for roads in a generally poor condition.
- The county council received an extra £2.9m in funding from the Department for Transport to repair roads damaged during the most recent winter. This is made up of £1.574m pothole grant and £1.362m from the flood resilience fund.
You can report pothole problems on Fix My Street
How to report a problem on Fix My Street:
- Visit fixmystreet.oxfordshire.gov.uk
- Enter an Oxfordshire postcode, or street name and area.
- Locate the problem on the map.
- Enter details of the problem. You can submit pictures if you have some, but don’t try to take them if it’s not safe to do so. If you can get a picture try to provide one that shows the defect and the area around it so our inspectors can find it on site – close ups of potholes don’t help too much.
- Confirm the report and Oxfordshire County Council will investigate.
- If you are reporting an emergency please do not report it online, but ring our Customer Service Centre on 0345 310 1111
You can view the full update here.
