Winter Road Treatment FAQs
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Winter can bring tricky road conditions. With a small workforce and miles of rural roads to cover, we take a prioritised approach to treating our roads for ice and snow. Full details are available on our Winter Service Plan page but here are some of the most commonly received questions. |
We treat Priority 1 routes with salt when we have a forecast for ice, sleet and snow or for freezing road surface temperatures in the next 24 hours.
Preventative runs may start the afternoon before, to catch the evening commute which helps disperse and activate the salt to do its job.
We aim to start Priority 1 routes and complete them within two hours.
We then move to Priority 2 routes as conditions and resources allow.
Treatment starts at 6am, with no new routes started after 6pm. This is based on the resources available (the size of our workforce, safe driver hours legislation, and the miles of priority routes our gritters need to cover), and the level of traffic needed to effectively activate the salt. So if you are on the roads early in the morning or after the main homeward rush in the evenings, the effects of treatment will be reduced - so please take additional care and drive according to the conditions.
Under adverse weather conditions and when snow is drifting resources may be withdrawn from lower priority routes to attend to the higher priority routes.
