WINTER MAINTENANCE FOR HIGHWAYS

As winter approaches take a look at the information provided by Calderdale Council regarding highway maintenance over the winter season.

Winter Maintenance for Highways from Calderdale Council

The official winter gritting season starts on 2nd November for 22 weeks.

During the winter months we try and keep the most important roads safe and as clear as possible from snow and ice. Calderdale has a fleet of 22 gritters and carry out precautionary salting to approximately two thirds of the Calderdale road network. The need to grit is determined by monitoring of weather conditions and analysis of information from local weather stations.

We use ‘Gritter Twitter’ to send daily tweets to Twitter users throughout winter to keep them up to date with our gritting actions or poor weather conditions – this can be found on twitter accounts by following @calderhighways. For those without twitter accounts you can still access the latest messages by visiting www.twitter.com/calderhighways which will show you the various messages.

These usually take the form of “Sub zero temperatures to continue. Precautionary routes will be gritted mid afternoon and known wet areas will be gritted early morning” and do not directly name routes, however information on when the Council grits routes can be found at http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/transport/roads/winter-service/index.html .

Our gritters can be deployed within 1 hour. It takes about 2½ hours to grit each of our precautionary routes.

We provide over 600 salt bins at key locations for use by residents, pedestrians and drivers.

Pavements and pedestrian areas do not receive precautionary salting. Salting and snow clearance will be carried out after a period of heavy snowfall or in extreme icy conditions.

This service is provided in town and village centres, along shopping parades, on main roads where there is a significant pedestrian flow and on access paths to hospitals, bus stations, schools, nurseries, surgeries/health centres, residential care homes and other establishments visited by vulnerable people. Routes have been prepared to cover these areas and assigned a priority to ensure that the most important routes are cleared first.

In order to assist people when they contact us to report key issues we have developed standard reporting forms for gritting, salt bins, street lighting and road/footway defects.

How to report a problem

There are standard forms for reporting the following problems available on the Council’s website:

Potholes; Damage to a bridge; Damage or missing manhole cover; Flooding on the road; Fly tipping; Pavement obstruction; Uneven/dangerous pavement; Request for a new street light; Request for removal of dead animal from road or pavement; Request for gully cleansing; Request for a road to be gritted or ploughed

In addition to these forms we will continue to have the dedicated e-mail address and Customer First telephone number 0845 245 7000.

We will also have an out of office telephone number for emergencies and dangerous highway defects - 08451 111 137.

Policy Framework
We work closely with the other West Yorkshire authorities and Metro to develop the West Yorkshire Local Transport Plan (LTP). This is our ‘blueprint’ and sets out what our long term needs, priorities and objectives are. These inform our programmes of work and the schemes we develop and implement.

The current LTP ‘My Journey’ covers the 15 year period from 2011 to 2026. It can be found here.
 

Photos from Hebden Royd