A bumpy road ahead for the city
WHY A PERFECT STORM OF CLIMATE CHANGE, AGE AND TOMATO KETCHUP-LIKE GROUND CONDITIONS IS RUINING HULL’S ROADS
IT’S time to put on our collective seatbelts and brace ourselves for plenty more emergency road works in Hull, like those about to start in Calvert Lane.
The busy route will close to through-traffic for eight weeks from next Monday after council highways officials declared the crumbling carriageway was in danger of a major failure.
Access for residents, businesses, two GP surgeries and the emergency services will be maintained throughout.
However, it’s just the latest in an increasing number of looming road failures being identified across the city in recent years, with problems literally surfacing well before they were normally expected to happen.
Similar drastic action to effectively rebuild sections of road has recently taken place in Clarence Street, Stoneferry Road and, only last month, Priory Road, while just across the city boundary in Cottingham, identical work has been necessary in Thwaite Street.
Using government funding secured through successful bidding for cash to extend bus and cycle lanes, the city council has managed to pre-empt further likely and potentially costly failures on main routes such as Hessle Road, Holderness Road and Anlaby Road where full reconstruction work has been carried out in the last 18 months. So why are our roads deteriorating faster than before?
According to the council, our increasingly rickety roads are the result of a perfect storm. Their age, the sheer volume of traffic using them and climate change are all contributory factors. Taken together with the way many of Hull’s older roads were originally built and you have a problem.
Most roads in the city were constructed using individual sections of layered concrete pieced together like a jigsaw. However, Hull’s traditional wet and unstable ground conditions are now combining with extreme weather to speed up the rate of deterioration, leading to more potholes and, in more serious cases, complete carriageway failures.
It’s not just roads either. This unseen stew is also largely responsible for a series of water and gas main collapses as seen in places like Walton Street, Wincolmlee, Bankside and Spring Bank West, where age has finally started to catch up with underground
Victorian infrastructure.
The council’s assistant director of major projects, Garry Taylor, recently summed up the situation. “This is all to do with the historic construction of the roads and the extreme climate shift between hot, cold and wet weather,” he explained to a scrutiny committee.
“What we are seeing is increased degradation in what is, in effect, a floating concrete road system which sits on top of the equivalent of an 18-metre layer of tomato ketchup. It’s why we are getting more failures every year.
“If you think about the rafts floating on land which is like tomato ketchup and when that tomato ketchup heats up and cools, and when water gets underneath, it all moves around and sometimes it gets shifted completely.
“Because of the unique construction we have got in Hull, it is more susceptible to climate change and that’s what we are finding. Because we are seeing these extreme events, we are seeing the whole network degrade at a significantly faster rate than we have done historically.”
There’s also a clue in the name when it comes to what has happened in Calvert Lane. It was originally a country lane but now it’s part of the unofficial inner-city ring road, having to bear the weight and volume of traffic it was never really meant to.
If you think of mapping the condition of Hull’s roads using the colours of a traffic light system, you get a sense of how bad things are.
With the exception of those recently completed schemes in Hessle Road, Anlaby Road and Holderness Road, every single part of the network is classed as a red or amber risk in terms of catastrophic failure.
While clusters of potholes still get patched, that approach is now being seen as akin to the boy who stuck his finger in the hole in a swollen dike.
Instead, major sectional reconstruction work is viewed as a better long-term value for money bet. The problem is, it’s very expensive.
Bear in mind, the council spends around £6m a year dealing with potential major road failures but currently has a £100m backlog of outstanding work which needs doing. Sadly, without a magic money tree, we are almost certainly going to see more sudden closures for similar urgent works in the future.