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Travel and
transport news
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Somerset Council has signed a new eight-year contract with Kier Transportation Ltd to deliver core maintenance across its road network.
The £225m agreement covers key maintenance works – including road repairs, drainage, verge cutting and winter service, such as gritting and other emergency functions in adverse weather.
Somerset has a 4,172-mile road network and the current contract with Milestone Infrastructure comes to an end at the end of March 2024.
Many of the staff currently operating under Milestone Infrastructure will be transferring their employment to the new contractor, ensuring the Council holds on to valuable experience and expertise.
Councillor Mike Rigby, Somerset Council’s Lead Member for Transport and Digital said: “We’re really delighted to have Kier Transportation Ltd as our new partner maintaining our network.
“We’ve had a fantastic working relationship with Milestone Infrastructure and we’d like to thank the team for their hard work and dedication, but with the conclusion of the contract there was an opportunity to do something new.
“This is a major refresh of our network maintenance services, something we’d not seen for 27 years, so we are committed to building in resilience to climate change, ensuring a safe, serviceable and sustainable network that is fit for purpose for all users and supports the growth of the local economy."
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Three members of our dedicated team at Glastonbury depot
Our fleet of 23 gritters is ready and primed to go and salt over 900 miles of Somerset's roads this winter.
Where can gritting updates be found?
Daily gritting updates will be posted on Travel Somerset's Twitter and Facebook channels throughout winter.
What did the team get up to last year?
Last year our gritter fleet went out on 67 occasions when freezing temperatures were forecast. There were 2,058 route actions in total, helping to prevent the formation of ice across 83,200 miles of Somerset’s roads.
Roadworks are always essential; the inconvenience they bring is an unfortunate side effect. We try to minimise any disruption as much as we can, but you should know that when nothing is happening on site it is almost always for good reason, and we challenge any inactivity without reason strongly.
Here are some of the reasons why traffic management can be left out by teams:
- It wastes public money to clear everything away between shifts; this prolongs closure hours too.
- It is often safer to leave traffic management on site; it prevents road users from travelling on material that hasn’t set yet.
- The workforce need breaks just like everyone else.
- Teams can be called away to deal with an emergency elsewhere on the network.
- If there is a gas or water leak, the road surface needs to vent and then be repaired and keeping traffic management in place speeds up this process.
- There’s a lot of old infrastructure underground, and it can be impossible to detect whether there will be any disruption to people’s water, gas or electric before work starts on a road. Once work begins, additional investigation of the area may need to take place, and this is always done safest under traffic management.
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Our team completed some vegetation removal on the B3224 earlier in the month.
This work comes ahead of an embankment stabilisation scheme due to take place at a later date.
The clearance was carried out in partnership with Openreach, who were planning to carry out some utilities work in the area.
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Earlier in the month, we announced that the countywide £2 fare was being extended to December 2024, with the Government's support.
That said, the 54, the 58/58a, the 28 and the 25 routes are at risk of being reduced. These buses connect towns like Taunton, Yeovil, Minehead, Dulverton and Wincanton - and as importantly all the villages in between!
Lots of people on these routes have no choice but to Bus It - so if you're a solo driver who likes saving lots of money, get on the bus for £2 a journey and help all the regulars out.
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Our team worked overnight for a couple of weeks in the middle of the month to resurface the A39 on Puriton Hill.
This is a busy stretch of road; following some prep work during the day, the resurfacing was completed at nights to make sure that disruption was minimal.
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