One of Halton’s 104 bridges ‘substandard’
ONLY one of more than 100 bridges in Halton is deemed ‘ substandard’ by a motoring charity and unable to carry the heaviest vehicles now seen on the borough’s roads.
Analysis of data by the RAC Foundation has founded that only one of the various bridges in Runcorn and Widnes is not fit to carry lorries of up to 44 tonnes.
The charity has not identified which of Halton’s 104 bridges it analysed as ‘substandard’.
Overall from 199 of the 207 local highway authorities in England, Scotland and Wales found that 3,203 structures over 1.5m in span are not fit to carry very heavy vehicles.
The 3,203 bridges represent 4.4% – about one in 23 – of the roughly 72,000 bridges to be found on the road network.
The number of substandard bridges is 35% greater than that estimated by the RAC Foundation to have been substandard two years earlier.
RAC Foundation director Steve Gooding said: “It’s the pothole backlog that normally hits the headlines but it is easy to forget all the other aspects of road maintenance that councils are involved in; from clearing ditches to cutting verges to maintaining bridges.
“In the face of growing traffic volumes and ageing infrastructure the danger is that without an adequate long-term funding settlement we will see more rather than fewer bridges with weight restrictions, with the backlog bill getting bigger all the time.”
A charity spokesman said that if money was no object, then councils would ‘ideally’ want to bring 2,110 of the bridges back up to standard.
However, budget restrictions mean councils only anticipate 416 of these will have the necessary work carried out on them within the next five years.
The one-off cost of bringing all the substandard bridges back up to perfect condition would be around £890m – the equivalent of £278,000 per structure.
The total cost of clearing the backlog of work on all bridges is estimated at £3.9bn. Councils are currently spending just an eighth of that – an estimated £447m – per year maintaining their entire bridge stock.
The survey of local highways authorities was carried out with the help of the National Bridges Group of the Association Of Directors Of Environment, Economics, Planning And Transportation (ADEPT).
The organisation’s chairman Liz Kirkham said: “The ADEPT Bridges group supports local authority bridge managers throughout the country and was pleased to work with the RAC Foundation on an important issue that can get overlooked.
“The figures identified by the RAC Foundation survey present a true picture of the funding backlog our members face.
“The problem is only compounded by the skills shortage in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths), which is having a serious impact across all engineering and manufacturing sectors.
“A growing number of substandard and restricted bridges that are not adequately maintained affect journey times and for rural communities in particular have an economic impact, creating barriers to growth.”