£8m cash pot for local road repairs

More than £8million will be spent by the council on roads in the Clydesdale area alone with work to repair weather damage adding to scheduled work and including no fewer than 54 separate resurfacing projects.

With responsibility to maintain more than 1400 miles of roads across the local authority area, the council is kept busy even in a year of moderate weather.

However, a winter where snow and ice freezes, expands and then thaws, not just once but frequently thoughout the season, is one of the worst situations for damaging road surfaces.

Councillor John Anderson, chair of Community and Enterprise Services, said: “Our road network inevitably faces challenges, not least of which is damage to the road surface from winter weather.

“When you consider the amount of roads that lie across the 1772 sq km of South Lanarkshire - and that the types of roads vary from town centres to remote rural area - you can see the scale of the work that lies before us.

“The council will be investing more than £8.2m in the upkeep of its roads across Clydesdale during the 2018/19 financial year, with around £2m of that allocated to routine, scheduled and reactive maintenance such as patching, pothole repairs, safety defects, road markings, signs and gully cleaning.

The remaining £6.2m has been allocated to planned maintenance projects covering 54 carriageway resurfacing projects that cover roads throughout Clydesdale.

See full story in today’s paper.