Richard Davies

In a large rural county like ours, the road and transport network is absolutely vital. It’s what keeps everything moving, like the oil in a car engine.

As Lincolnshire County Council’s executive member for highways and transport, I care passionately about the local infrastructure – and, judging by my postbag and email inbox, so do residents!

Much of your correspondence with me is about potholes, so I’m pleased to tell you we’re making real progress in tackling them.

Extra money from the Government last summer – plus our own careful budgeting – enabled us to spend an additional £12m on highways maintenance in 2014, on top of the £50m already planned.

As this year draws to a close, we expect to have resurfaced over four million square metres of roads and permanently repaired thousands more potholes.

Already, I think we’re seeing a big difference, and I’m delighted – in my regular visits to all four corners of the county – to hear how many residents and businesses feel the same.

What’s more, it’s just been announced that we’ll be getting a further windfall of £9m from the Government for highways maintenance in 2015/16 – a real boost to our plans.

As well as maintaining the road network, we give priority to winter gritting, ensuring we have at least 34,000 tonnes of salt – bought in advance at the best prices – in stock at any one time.

More generally, we’re committed to long-term infrastructure investment to keep Lincolnshire moving. That’s not just good for local people in their day-to-day lives, it’s also crucial for our economic prosperity.

At this time last year, we had just finished a major programme of works on Lincoln’s Newark Road, at the junctions with Brant Road, Hykeham Road and Rookery Lane.

As anticipated, it has eased congestion on a vital route in and out of the city, while the Access LN6 sustainable travel project though North Hykeham has also notched up real successes.

They include more than 2,500 rentals under our hirebike scheme since its launch in August 2013.
With an extra six hirebike stations now installed, the take-up should move up another gear in 2015, encouraging even more people to leave their cars at home.

Meanwhile, bus travel to Witham St Hughs and Bassingham has increased by more than 70% since 2011 – the equivalent of 14,000 new passengers on the PC Coaches 38 and 49 services.

On the coast, the council has been awarded £4m for sustainable transport in Skegness in 2016-17, enabling us to improve things like footways, cyclepaths, bus priority and signage.

In Grantham, too, the long-awaited relief road is finally starting to take shape, with work due to start in the spring on the first leg. Design on a similar scheme for Spalding is also underway.

Then there’s the vital East-West Link in Lincoln, where construction started in November, and a Canwick Road upgrade, due to begin early in New Year.

For the future, a public inquiry into the legal orders needed for the Lincoln Eastern Bypass will be held within the next few months, hopefully enabling us to move the scheme forward while £50m of Government funding remains available.

Away from roads, we and our “onlincolnshire” project partner BT are proud of our shared success in extending the availability of superfast broadband to over 1,000 more properties every week.

Whether it’s broadband or bypasses, bikes or buses, it’s all about investing in 21st-century connectivity for the benefit of present and future generations.

Despite the challenges ahead, that’s surely something to celebrate this New Year!

Last year we carried out some major work on Newark Road to improve traffic flow, as well as provide better facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. The scheme cost just over £2 million to complete, with most of the money coming from a government grant.

At the time we said the increase in junction capacity would lead to fewer tailbacks, particularly for westbound traffic coming out of the city. Since we finished the work, I’ve had some people get in touch to say that it’s made a big difference, and others who’ve said it’s done the opposite, and that we were what the French would call, “les incompetent” (bonus point if you can guess the movie quote!).

Our highways team, as they always do following a major project like this, looked at the data from our traffic light system from a random midweek day from this year, and the same from the year before. These graphs indicate the average delay per vehicle throughout the day, and they’ve been labelled to show the approach – either inbound or outbound. The blue line is last year, and the red line is this year.

There are some major gains on Newark Road with big reductions in delays, but there are benefits on other approaches too. People I’ve spoken to have said they’ve seen big improvements on Brant Road and Hykeham Road in the morning peak, and the graphs support this.

That said, the delays are clearly slightly worse now on Rookery lane, particularly around school leaving time and the evening peak. It can also take slightly longer now to turn right into Brant Road, but there’s not much in it.

Overall the data speaks for itself, warts and all. The scheme delivered what it set out to – bringing reduced journey times for those leaving the city on Newark Road, and for those entering it. We said originally that we thought we could shave up to two minutes of the waiting time for queuing traffic, and the graphs show that at peak times, we more-or-less have done.

As I’ve said, congestion has slightly increased on Rookery Lane. It’s only when you carry out traffic modelling across a whole city it shows just how interrelated everything is. Problems at one junction are often caused by a lack of capacity in another junction the other side of town. With that in mind, the £30 million of work we’re doing later in the year on Canwick Hill and on the East-West Link Road will make a big difference, not just in isolated areas but across the whole city — Rookery Lane included.

Of course, the data doesn’t tell the whole story – we also carried out a lot of general maintenance work while we were on Newark Road. This had no impact on journey times, but it did extend the lifespan of the road and Brace Bridge by 20 years. And the data is also blind to how much pedestrians and cyclists have benefitted from the changes – and we’re pretty sure that the improvements have made a big difference.

The road works at Newark Road were annoying for motorists and they caused people a lot of irritation at the time, but that’s the price of change. You can see that they’ve made quite a substantial difference to the area, and thanks to the government grant, they came at a relatively small cost to the local taxpayers.

Hopefully, over the next few years we can continue to unlock Lincoln’s traffic problems one-by-one, helping to support the city’s growth and development in the process.