Information I have obtained from a senior member of council staff has revealed that the council spends so little on road repairs it would take over 100 years to resurface all of Aberdeen’s roads!

The situation with pavement repairs is even worse. At current spending levels, it would take 456 years to resurface all of Aberdeen’s pavements.

This is clearly unacceptable. My Liberal Democrat colleagues and I will continue to press for more to be invested in road and pavement resurfacing and repairs. What is needed is a long-term plan to bring Aberdeen’s pavements and roads up to an acceptable standard – and them keep them in that condition.

This information was provided to me in an e-mail from the council’s Roads Infrastructure Manager. The e-mail says:

“This year’s budget has been allocated to 60,500 sq m of road replacement, total roads area is 6,216,000 sq m. Timescales at this rate of coverage would be 103 years. It should be noted that we are managing to carry out works to greater areas by not doing full depth reconstruction, once we have to do this areas of repair will reduce, could be by 50%.

“This year’s budget has been allocated to 6,000 sq m of footway replacement, total footway area is 2,740,000 sq m. Timescales at this rate of coverage would be 456 years. It should be noted that we are carrying out work to footpaths with high tree root damage and the repair is more expensive to these small locations, although they are improving the general deterioration and safety of the footpaths.”

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