{"id":21369,"date":"2019-01-18T16:57:54","date_gmt":"2019-01-18T16:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ihbconline.co.uk\/newsachive\/?p=21369"},"modified":"2019-01-18T16:57:54","modified_gmt":"2019-01-18T16:57:54","slug":"rac-foundation-analysis-indicates-substandard-council-maintained-bridges-on-the-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=21369","title":{"rendered":"RAC Foundation analysis indicates \u2018substandard\u2019 council-maintained bridges on the rise"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-21370\" src=\"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/rac_website180119.png\" alt=\"website\" width=\"300\" height=\"285\" \/>RAC Foundation analysis indicates that thousands of structures are operating with weight restrictions and that almost 3,500 council-maintained road bridges in Great Britain are substandard.<\/h3>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>RAC Foundation writes:<\/p>\n<p>Analysis of data for the 2016-17 financial year \u2013 received from 204 of the 207 local highway authorities in England, Scotland and Wales \u2013 found that 3,441 structures over 1.5m in span are not fit to carry the heaviest vehicles now seen on our roads, including lorries of up to 44 tonnes. Many of these bridges have weight restrictions. Others will be under programmes of increased monitoring or even managed decline.<\/p>\n<p>The 3,441 bridges represent 4.6% (about 1 in 22) of the roughly 74,000 bridges to be found on the local road network. The number of substandard bridges is slightly higher than the 3,203 identified a year previously. If money was no object, then councils would ideally want to bring 2,077 of the substandard bridges back up to standard. However, budget restrictions mean councils only anticipate 370 of these will have the necessary work carried out on them within the next five years.<\/p>\n<p>The one-off cost of bringing all the substandard bridges back up to perfect condition would be around \u00a3934 million \u2013 equivalent to \u00a3271,000 per structure. The total cost of clearing the backlog of work on all bridges \u2013 including those that are substandard \u2013 is estimated at \u00a35 billion, up sharply (28%) on the estimate of \u00a33.9 billion a year earlier. At the same time, the estimated amount of money councils are spending annually on maintaining their entire bridge stock is \u00a3367 million, just a fourteenth of the backlog total and down on the \u00a3447 million spent in the previous year.<\/p>\n<p>The survey of local highways authorities was carried out with the help of the National Bridges Group of ADEPT (the Association of Directors of Environment, Economics, Planning and Transportation) with the data collected in the autumn of 2017, a year on from a similar exercise.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.racfoundation.org\/research\/economy\/substandard-council-bridges-on-the-rise\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read more&#8230;.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>RAC Foundation analysis indicates that thousands of structures are operating with weight restrictions and that almost 3,500 council-maintained road bridges in Great Britain are substandard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sector-newsblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21369"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21371,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21369\/revisions\/21371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}