The cost of repairs to Doncaster’s crumbling roads is £135m
One of Doncaster's many potholes, on Highfield Road, Doncaster. Picture: Liz Robinson D3280LR
DONCASTER would need £135 million to bring its crumbling roads up to “acceptable” standards - nearly double what the cash-strapped council is having to cut.
At a time when the authority has laid off hundreds of staff to recoup around £70 million it will not received from the Government, the council has estimated the figure it would need to repair its road network.
The estimate is the second highest in Yorkshire, with only Sheffield suggesting a higher figure at £150 million.
Peter Dale, the council’s director of regeneration and environment put the scale of the sum down to Doncaster’s status as the largest metropolitan borough in the country in terms of the space it covers.
He said: “Doncaster has one of the largest metropolitan road networks in the UK, responsible for over a thousand miles of roads.
“It is difficult to define exactly what an ‘acceptable state’ is.
“To put it very simply, we consider it to mean where the surface of the road is even and there are no more repairs needed for the time being.
“The cost to do this would be around £135 million determined in accordance with national guidelines and is sometimes referred to as the backlog of repairs which exist on the roads of all the Highway Authorities.”
But officials at the authority recently stated they had only around 60 potholes logged with the council for repair.
The Doncaster figure is almost 70 per cent higher than that in Leeds, where estimates put the figure at £80 million.
Local transport minister Norman Baker said the Government had given councils in Yorkshire £307 million to spend on road maintenance.
The county also received just under £19 million to repair damage caused by the icy conditions during the cold winter of 2010.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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saratoga
Sunday, March 4, 2012 at 05:59 PMnow lets see. there are approximately 26,208,000 cars in the UK so if we assume say £150 road tax that's £3,9 billion per year So get the holes filled in you whinging prats.
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