RANCE
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(me the talking ended
BY R. H. PHILLIPSON, Secretary, British Road Federation TN a winter that by most standards has been mild, sharp falls of snow last month produced surprising results. Electricity and gas supplies failed, rail services were disrupted and on the roads an all-too-familiar pattern emerged with cars and lorries bogged down and abandoned.
Surely the time has come to ask why a country, with a climate where the unexpected is commonplace, can be brought to the brink of chaos by seasonal winter weather. Or have we perhaps come to accept the closure of vital trunk roads as unavoidable?
This winter, the failure of electricity and gas boards to maintain normal supplies rightly provoked an outcry in which both industry and the public demanded an explanation.
Because of the furore, the interruption of road transport services received less critical attention. Yet the fact was that the A.6, the west coast route to Scotland, was severed. So, too, were a score of major roads in other places.
What this showed quite clearly was that the Ministry of Transport and local authorities had still not learned the lesson taught by the exceptional winters of 1947 and 1963. The winter of 1963 was exceptionally the worst since 1947. Until 1947 winter maintenance had been very much a makeshift operation, with heavy vehicles and buses "borrowed" and fitted with snow ploughs. Grit and salt was shovelled on to frosty roads from the backs of lorries.
It was obviously not enough and in their determination to avoid a similar breakdown of services in the future highway authorities acted quickly. Special trucks were acquired that could easily be fitted with snow ploughs and automatic glitter bodies. The Ministry of Transport, besides distributing a large number of trucks on permanent loan to local authorities, established six emergency snow plough depots in the regions. Thus by 1963 there were 700 appliances on loan from the Ministry whilst, in the depots, 75 big blowers and ploughs were held in reserve ready to be sent wherever they were most needed.
But despite these improvements, the equipment and the ability of highway authorities to deal with extreme weather conditions were still proved in 1963 to be gravely inadequate.
As much was admitted in a Ministry of Transport circular to local authorities in October 1963. On the evidence of reports from divisional road engineers the Ministry concluded that "despite great efforts by all concerned, there is scope for further improvement in the winter maintenance service."
One main cause of trouble is still the sheer cost of snow clearing operations. While motorway and trunk road clearance is carried out by local authorities acting as agents of the Ministry who meet the complete cost involved, in the case of classified roads costs are met part by Ministry grant and the remainder from local rates.
Again, although the Government will increase the road maintenance grant at the end of a bad winter, a heavy burden can be thrust on the ratepayer. In some cases rather than do this local authorities will cut back their normal road maintenance programme which, in terms of road safety and efficiency, is a high price to pay.
The autumn of 1963 was the season of good intentions. A £6m. programme, phased over a number of years, was announced by the Ministry of Transport to improve the winter maintenance of trunk roads. Some of the improvements are now under way; but the impression remains that two mild winters have cushioned the initial urgency. Snowbound vehicles are still almost an annual feature in some areas and the signs are that another bad winter will exact the same financial loss in man hours wasted and damage to vehicles.
The Ministry's programme, in the light of experience gained on motorways and experiments carried out by the Road Research Laboratory, aimed to provide agent authorities with about 240 salting and gritting 5+-ton vehicles, which would also be capable of dealing with moderate falls of snow. At the end of 1965, however, only 143 were in use-93 of these on trunk roads, 35 on motorways and 15 in reserve.
Another feature of the plan was to replace the large vehicles, described as obsolete, with 160 vehicles of 11+ tons capacity to cope with heavy snowfalls. Like the 5-1–tonners, they were to be sited on selected trunk routes at approximately 30-mile intervals. That was two years ago; today, none of these vehicles is actually in operation, and their introduction is not planned until 1967-68.
In the meantime, the plan to establish winter maintenance sites at 30-mile intervals on trunk roads has been scrapped. Instead, the policy now is to set them up at points where experience in the past has shown they are most needed. In theory, the proposal seems a practical one, but weather records prove an unreliable guide; except for some remote areas it is largely impossible to predict where heavy snowfalls are likely to occur.
At the same time, fortunately, the Ministry's national reserve of rotary snow ploughs has been expanded and modernised; but by itself this will not counteract the regional weaknesses where there is still a serious shortage of 54-and I 1+-tormers.
As a corollary of the 1963 plan, the Ministry proposed to arrange, each autumn, courses to which highway authorities could send staff for training in the handling of the new equipment. But it appears that the cheese parer has been in action here as well; the autumn courses are "not now envisaged" and, instead, when a new depot is opened or the latest equipment introduced, operators can attend a one-day course at the central maintenance depot at Hendon.
It is quite clear that financial restrictions are most to blame for the inadequacy of winter preparations. Last summer cuts in public expenditure, which led to the deferment of certain major road schemes, are likely to have a lasting effect on the winter maintenance programme. For a start, they led to the shelving indefinitely of plans for another central maintenance depot in the North of England (at Cuerdon in Lancashire). Their more serious effect, of course, was on the motorway programme. Hopes of completing the 1,000 miles of motorway promised by the early 1970s are receding, and experience has shown that in snowbound conditions motorways are the easiest routes to keep open and the safest to use.
From the very start county authorities, acting as agents of the Ministry, were encouraged to make a determined effort to keep motorways free from frost ice at all times and to keep at least one lane open to traffic under the worst snow conditions. On the Ml, all three lanes in both directions have been constantly clear and the only interference has been caused when fresh fallen snow and slush have formed between the passing of ploughs. Again, despite very heavy snowfalls on the Ross and Maidstone motorways, blade ploughs and rotary ploughs have always succeeded in keeping at least one lane open throughout on both carriageways.
It is quite clear in all this, that the efficiency of snow clearance on the motorways demonstrates effectively that the one permanent answer to the unpredictable extremes of British weather is to accelerate the present motorway programme.
Much of our thinking on winter maintenance is concerned with measures to combat snow and ice once they present a hazard. There are, however, ways in which safeguards can be provided in advance.
The first, of course, is the provision of snow fences which are already fairly widely used on trunk roads. Kent County Council, for example, has had considerable success with them; but the Principal drawback is that it is impossible to rely on the wind and snow coming from any one direction.
Another method is the installation of electric road heating, and at present there are some 25 sites where this is in operation. It has been installed in the London area at the North Circular underpass at Hanger Lane, the Hook underpass on the Kingston by-pass, the Hammersmith fly-over and sites at Slough and Harmondsworth. It is probably neither necessary nor desirable to install heating on motorways; but even accepting the enormous cost involved— approximately £2 per sq. yd.—a great deal could be done at major trunk road intersections and on steep gradients.
It is, of course, important in all this to maintain a degree of balance. The big freeze-up which causes wide disruption still occurs only infrequently. But the cost involved in a breakdown in transport services is so serious for commerce and industry, as 1963 proved,. that maintenance provisions must be radically improved.