Author: Mike C

A notable scrutiny meeting took place on the 12th March looking at some of the issues that most exercise residents:

• How highway interventions such as crossings, yellow lines etc. are prioritised
• Pothole repairs and pavement maintenance
• Leaf and Gully Clearance
• Preventing Accidents

It was the Scrutiny Committee’s attempt at clarity and transparency in the prioritisation of interventions on a limited budget. I think the scrutiny committee made some progress.

The video of the meeting is worth watching.

Summary of Meeting

Matrix Prioritisation

There was considerable focus from the committee on why certain projects get to the top of the list and others are held back. The example pursued by the committee was ‘double yellow lines’, something that requires a traffic regulation order (TRO). The presentation included a couple of matrices (shown above), but the officers hadn’t submitted all of them and they promised to follow up by submitting the TRO matrix.

Even without the relevant matrix I think we can get a picture of how proposals are scored. But then it got slightly more complicated.

• Sometimes opportunities arose to attach the job to another funding stream (examples included Active Travel and the Sale West and Altrincham Network Infrastructure project (Swani)). This could work both ways, bringing forward some projects but holding back others where a cross benefit project might be ‘anticipated’.
• Finance – I’m hoping they score cost v benefit in all cases, but the nature of yearly budgeting means it is sometimes only possible to do smaller works

There followed a degree of interogation on whether other interventions could push a project up to the top of the list, a senior councillor’s intervention or a popular petition heard in council.

Overall on Traffic Matrices

Essentially, we’re arguing over crumbs. The allocated budgets are so small that it’s hard to see some worthwhile schemes ever happening. We ought to have transparency regardless of the budget. These decisions are far less complex than officers and lead councillors protest. I don’t have a problem that political imperative might play a part in decisions as long as we can see that it has been applied.

The public are seeing comparatively vast amounts put into active travel. Whilst that is an entirely separate budget, I think the public want to see objectivity and prudence applied to those schemes too.

I would like to see all the various matrices and projects published on the council’s website. We’re going to have seek solutions to this growing backlog of work and the more we can be upfront about it, the better.

Two thirds of our footpaths are functionally impaired

Footways v Highways

“Footways are obviously a big priority for us, but we have to first and foremost , go with the safety issue and where we can have the most impact on safety. So, the fast majority goes on the ABC network and not on the U class network.” – Chris Morris

Generally, this is fair. If it was just four-wheeled motor vehicles, I could argue that damaged urban roads reduce speed and improve safety, but the effect of a pothole on two-wheeled vehicles can have fatal repercussions.

Nevertheless, our footways are in an unacceptable condition. This is a critical element of our activity supporting infrastructure that’s unusable for a lot of people and it’s getting worse.

Pothole repairs

My colleague, Cllr Simon Thomas, raised the quality of pothole repairs. He said he was astounded that we were not sealing the potholes and argued that we should also cutting the hole square for a better fix.

I’m not sure I understand the response from officers in terms of the specific question, but I do get that the underlying condition of the road is the primary concern of the road engineers since the pothole is only the visible manifestation of a larger condition deterioration. That said, if pothole repairs are disintegrating within a short space of time, we need to know.

Vision Zero / Road Safety

Greater Manchester has talked a good talk on reducing serious injury on our roads, but I really haven’t seen proactive responses. I thought the most interesting comment was that Trafford officers described the Vision Zero team as being ‘resourced’ (as Trafford sees when they regularly meet). My take is that we need to see output from ‘Vision Zero.

Resources:

Presentations submitted to the Scrutiny Committee

I’ve only skimmed the surface of the information submitted to Scrutiny Committee, but I’ve tried to pick out the key elements that are of concern to residents. It’s well worth watching the whole exchange. By all means add your comments below and I’ll try and respond.