With the arriyal 40-tonne trucks only months away, why is
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Britain's bridge strengthening programme at least seven years behind schedule? Patrick Hook reports on an issue which is set to present major problems to hauliers as HGVs are rerouted to avoid unsafe bridges. The Government now admits the bridge-strengthening programme needed for heavier lorries has failed. Less than nine months away from a deadline which will see the arrival of 40-tonne lorries in this country, more than 2,200 bridges are considered to pose such a threat to safety that they will need to be strengthened. The job, originally planned to have been completed by 31 December 1998, will not now be finished until 2005 at the earliest.
This means a period of prolonged disruption to the haulage industry as bridges are temporarily propped up or closed to HGVs as the Highways Agency and local authorities struggle to complete the task with inadequate funds.
Derogation In 1984 most of the UK's partners in Europe signed up to an EC Directive permitting the use of 40-tonne trucks, increasing the axle load from 10.5 to 11.5 tonnes. At the time the UK successfully argued for a derogation until 1 January 1999 on the grounds that it had only recently increased its maximum permitted lorry weight from 32.5 to 38 tonnes so an extensive programme of bridge strengthening would be needed to cope with the heavier vehicles.
Despite all this, the work on assessing the size of the problem did not even begin until three years later, in November 1987. To put the size of the task faced by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) into perspective, there are about 44,000 bridges owned by 203 local authorities throughout England and Wales, each of which is required to carry out its own assessment programme. Another 7,000 structures are owned by Railtrack, whose legal obligation extends only to maintaining its bridges to a weight limit of 24 tonnes. A further 9,500 bridges, carrying the primary route network, are the responsibility of the Highways Agency.
While not all these bridges need to be strengthened, they all needed to be assessed and, in the case of Railtrack property, there continues to be considerable opposition by Railtrack to the idea that it should have to spend money assessing and subsequently strengthening structures for the benefit of a competitive mode of transport.
And the problems don't end there. In 1996 the Transport Select Committee reported that, in the first seven years of the programme, only 507 of the 1,241 bridges owned by the Highways Agency and in need of strengthening had been completed.
Slow as the progress had been to that date, it was to become even slower in the following years, with only 17 bridges dealt with in the financial year 1996/97, leaving an impossible 717 to be strengthened in the remaining twoand-a-half years. And for local authority bridges there is now a general recognition that, while the assessment programme will have been completed by the end of this year, the strengthening work will not end until 2005 at the earliest.
The difficulty is that until each bridge has been assessed there can be no clear idea of what is involved in bringing it up to the required standard. Even when this process has been completed, the bridges continue to require maintenance.
Priority It all costs money, which both the Highways Agency and the local authorities claim is in short supply. For its part, the Government will only allocate funds on the basis of the priority that it is prepared to give the project. So far there appears to be a distinct lack of enthusiasm to provide anything like the amount of cash required.
In the financial year just beginning, the DETR's Transport Supplementary Grant, designed to fund the bridge strengthening programme, amounts to £100m shared between the 203 local authorities which own bridges on the road network. But, while the £36m earmarked for the assessment stage is sufficient to cover all costs, the remaining £64m intended to finance the strengthening programme falls a long way short of the £200m-plus sought by the local authorities for their immediate needs. The Highways Agency has also been in a quandary As long ago as 1996 it had become obvious to chief executive Lawrie Haynes that the agency's original schedule of work had slipped badly.
In evidence to the Transport Select Committee in the summer of that year, Haynes blamed the lack of progress on central Government and said that a shortfall in funding made it very unlikely that the agency would meet the January 1999 deadline. The consequences of any failure to provide the agency with the extra £450m required would, he said, mean the majority of the main road bridges still requiring work on 1 January 1999 would need to be temporarily propped or be closed to HGVs until they could be properly strengthened.
Responsibilities While it is unlikely that any major trunk or motorway route will be closed to HGVs, the position in regard to some B-roads is less clear. Railtrack, whose bridges only carry B and unclassified roads, has made it clear that, while it intends to comply with its legal responsibilities so far as the 24-tonne limit is concerned, it is less inclined to spend an estimated £400m helping to bring these bridges into line with the 1999 requirements.
"We do not prevent vehicles over 24 tonnes using our bridges," says Railtrack's Andrew Packham. "If it is established that a bridge is unsuitable for loadings (over 24 tonnes) then a weight restriction sign will be displayed. It is not a physical restraint ...and if someone wants to drive across a bridge then a sign is not going to stop them."
This less-than-satisfactory solution should be a cause for concern. There is already a wealth of anecdotal evidence to support the view that weight restrictions are being flouted by the foolish minority impatient to reach their destinations. This situation will not be helped by increasing the number of bridges subject to weight restrictions.
The likelihood of this happening was improved when the Highways Agency reviewed its policy on bridge strengthening in July 1996 and decided that not all bridges needed to be capable of taking 40-tonne trucks. "We have changed our objectives to a more sensible strategy," said Peter Nutt, operations director at the Highways Agency, in an interview in Local Transport Today in August 1996.
This apparently includes allowing some bridges to carry 40-tonners on the basis that the anticipated volume of such traffic is too low to constitute a safety risk.
For most hauliers, even those using 40tonne trucks, the failure to ensure the completion of the bridge strengthening programme on time will be of no consequence. Both the Highways Agency and the DETR have given an assurance that the primary route network will be ready to receive the heavier traffic on 1 January next year, although some bridges will need to be temporarily propped.
However, a number of hauliers will be affected. In its final report, the Transport Select Committee said: "If bridges (on some minor roads) are unable to cope with heavy lorries they will have to be closed or weight limited in some way. And such measures could isolate many businesses from the road network and there are likely to be many instances where firms will suffer as a result."
In the longer term the real problem lies in the fact that, according to Highways Agency chief executive Lawrie Haynes: "The current level of funding will not be enough to avoid some deterioration of the network."