Local highways maintenance transparency report

Results below from externally provided road condition surveys.

2.1 A roads

2.2 B and C roads

2.3 U roads

Hartlepool Borough Council use externally provided road condition surveys to assess the state of the roads. The results above are grouped into three categories:

• Green – the road is in good condition and no further investigation or treatment is required

• Amber – some deterioration of the road surface has taken place and the road should be monitored for signs of further deterioration or, if condition allows, be considered for a preventative maintenance scheme such as surface dressing which may prolong the life of the carriageway and therefore prevent it from falling into the red category (see below).

• Red – the road is deemed to be in poor condition and should be immediately assessed for maintenance as soon as possible. In some cases localised repairs can be carried out as opposed to inclusion on future large scale maintenance programmes.
  (Following the unclassified survey in 2023 concerns were raised with the subsequent volume of ‘red rated’ roads. This was communicated to the survey contractor and they seemed concerned enough to arrange a re-survey of the network which was offered. However timescales meant it was very close to the forthcoming years survey and therefore it was decided to withdraw this offer).

The published official statistics for road condition include more detail about the methodology, timing and coverage of this data.

2.4 Additional information on carriageway condition

Hartlepool Borough Council undertakes external surveys of its entire road network over a two year period which provides up to date condition data of the carriageway asset. There are two types of surveys which are dependent upon the classification of the road, and the data from both surveys contributes towards the Council’s five year highway maintenance plan with the difference in the two datasets requiring two slightly different methods of analysis.

SCANNER 

This laser based survey is very detailed and data is collected by a machine across 100%, annually, of the A, B and C classified roads of the town.

Coarse Visual Inspection (CVI) 

This is predominantly a two man driven inspection where defects are manually recorded on dedicated software stored on a laptop as the network is driven in a standard vehicle. This survey covers the unclassified network of the town and is now evenly split over a two year cycle  - until 2025/26 a full survey of the network was carried out each year.