FROM THE CHAMBER With Cllr Pauline Jorgensen
Potholes. It’s a real frustration for so many residents in the Borough, myself included.
Not only can they cause damage to cars and vans, but they can lead to uncomfortable journeys, and for those riding bicycles and motorcycles, can potentially be dangerous.
In normal times, trying to fix potholes means disruption for motorists, as roads are closed for the time it takes to fill in a pothole, or sometimes even to completely resurface a road.
However, the pandemic has meant quieter roads caused by less traffic, so that Wokingham Borough Council has been able to accelerate its road repair programme.
Over the last 12 months, we have carried out 1,231 reactive repair jobs on roads across the Borough, where residents and councillors have informed us about potholes – that’s an average of 105 repair jobs per month.
We also have large-scale programme of road resurfacing.
We have committed £8million to repairing our roads for 2020-21, and by the end of the spring, we aim to resurfaced 15 roads in Woodley, Earley, Finchampstead and Barkham.
Over the next three years, we aim to invest more than £160million in delivering road repairs and new roads across the Borough and this budget we again doubled our maintenance budget to help keep the pothole at bay.
We are always innovative in how we can fix our roads quickly while ensuring value for money.
Just this week, I joined a team from the Council for an outdoors, socially-distanced test of a JCB patching machine in Winnersh, and had the opportunity to talk to the guys who work rain or shine to look after our roads and are at the sharp end of any repairs.
I learned quite a bit about the technique used for permanent repairs and the importance of the tar temperature to the whole process, I was surprised to find its actually at 180ºC when they shovel it into the hole and tamp and roll it down.
The new machine can carry out all the different stages of preparing a pothole to receive the tar including gutting a stepped straight edge to prevent water ingress and collecting the debris, removing the need to bring along multiple pieces of equipment to a repair job.
We will carry out another trial of the machine, but these sort of innovations have the potential to dramatically speed up our repair programme while cutting the cost.
Your Conservative Council is committed to ensuring that you have the best travel experience possible – whether by car, bus or bike.
No part of our Borough gets left behind.
You can report a pothole to us on our website, if you use the map to report holes the requests go straight to the contractor who does the work speeding up the response time, or by calling 0118 974 6000 and selecting “Highways”.
Cllr Pauline Jorgensen is the Executive Member for Highways and Transport and Conservative councillor for Hillside Ward at Wokingham Borough Council
