Lincolnshire County Council is spending £5m to put a stone chip surface dressing at 150 sites around the county.
It will involve putting down 21,000 tonnes of material to extend the life of the roads in a more resilient way than pothole patching. 12,000 tonnes of that original 21 will be recycled aggregate (basically, sweepings from the road that come from last season’s works).
Cllr Richard Davies, Executive member for Highways is a big fan of surface dressing and says that the summer season will be a boost for many: “It’s one of the real hero methods for getting more life out of a road with a fraction of the cost of having to dig a road up and rebuild it.
“And because of that, we get to get more return for our money. It’s so cost-effective that surface dressing in this way comes in at just a tenth of what we’d spend on alternative materials to achieve a similar result. It’s much quicker to lay, too.”
About 30,000 square metres can be laid in a day, and the works don’t always require a full road closure.
“With the programme we have planned across the summer we will get roads that are better to drive on, last longer and are easier to maintain. The surface dressing will also help to prevent or reduce pothole proliferation and it seals the surface from water, which makes the whole road more resilient.
“So surface dressing is a vitally important part of how we are working on maintaining the roads network in as financially efficient a way as possible. And the scale on which we are putting these measures into practice over the summer will give Lincolnshire a big boost ahead of next winter.”
