Local Highway Maintenance Transparency Report 2025 - 2026
Section 6 - Climate change and resilience
6.1 Decarbonising maintenance operations
The council has established a carbon reduction group in partnership with Tarmac which has the council's current term maintenance contract. We have begun using warm lay road resurfacing materials (instead of high carbon, hot lay materials) and a new thinner surfacing product with a much-improved finish and greater longevity both of which have much lower (carbon footprint).
The annual carbon reduction from the use of warm lay materials for resurfacing and ultrathin materials equates to some 64 tons of CO2e (the standard measurement of greenhouse gas) in the 2023 to 2024 programme. The aim going forward will be to find greater annual savings to improve on this baseline and to use this information to assist the decision-making process when it comes to choice of materials, treatments and intervention timing. This work will allow us to develop a new highway decarbonisation policy/strategy in 2025 for highway infrastructure to add to the work already providing carbon reduction benefits with street lighting and traffic signals.
Recent improvements in management of our traffic signals with a new asset management system and inventory is allowing us to target sites for repair on obsolescence and reliability. The conversion of all 180 traffic signal sites from the existing tungsten halogen lighting to LED is now very much a priority with some 50 sites outstanding.
The conversion is expensive, however the benefits in energy and carbon savings as well as reliability are excellent. In 2023 to 2024 a successful bid to central government has provided a grant of over £100,000 to be used on upgrading old equipment. The successful LED conversion programme with our street lighting estate has also provided energy and carbon savings and was a key target in earlier years of the HAMP.
6.2 Network resilience
A key aim of the Gateshead HAMP is to improve the resilience of the highway network to deal with severe weather events particularly flooding. For the last 2 years we have been using a gulley management software programme to look at the performance of all our 30,000 highway drains. The information is used to identify areas requiring greater attention at sites with known flood risk issues. This information will allow us to develop a strategy to make the network more resilient with resources directed to the areas of greatest need. The same data is collected on culverts and other blockage points to ascertain which screens and entrances need to be cleaned more regularly and in advance of bad weather forecasts.
Resilience in terms of choosing the correct surfacing materials to last in different areas of Gateshead has already been discussed in section 3.2 similarly carefully monitoring faults and frequent issues relating to traffic signals and street lighting and changing to longer lasting equipment also builds in resilience into the network.