Environment and roads

Managing the road network

Managing Hertfordshire's road network
Keeping Hertfordshire’s roads up to scratch is an ongoing challenge for Hertfordshire Highways. Not only do we have some of the busiest roads in the country, but with both car and commercial vehicle usage in the county rising, the amount of wear and tear on our roads is also on the increase.

The highway network is the county council’s most valuable asset and is currently valued at over £3.2 billion. However, with the high level of use, our roads are depreciating at a rate of over £50 million each year.

Our new approach
To tackle this deterioration we have adopted an 'asset management' approach. What this means for highway maintenance is that we consider over a much longer term all the roads in the county in relation to one another when working out which ones to repair first, rather than automatically fixing the roads which look worst. This enables us to make the best use of the limited resources we have but sometimes causes confusion when people see us fixing roads that appear to be in better condition than some others.

Here is an example scenario to help explain why we now work in this way, and how it benefits our roads over the long term.

When looking to improve a particular area, we may find one road in a really bad condition and three other roads in a slightly better condition. With the limited budget available to us we have to decide whether to spend all our money on the worst road, and let the other three roads continue to deteriorate into a worse condition, or whether to spend the minimum amount necessary to keep the worst road safe and invest the remaining budget on the other three roads to stop them deteriorating into the same poor condition as the first road.

So, in terms of our budget, if we repaired the worst road first we would find, in a year’s time, that we have one good road and three other ‘bad’ roads all needing a larger amount of money spent on them. However, if we spend the budget on bringing the three ‘less bad’ roads up to standard, in a year’s time we would find that we have three good roads and only one bad road to spend our limited budget on.

In the long term, it is obvious that this is a good way for us to spend the limited amount of money we have for our road network. However, in the short term, it may appear that we are ignoring those roads which appear to be in the greatest need of our attention, but this is not the case.

To organise this approach across 5,000km of roads, we have developed an 'Asset Management Plan'. We are leading the field with this new way of tackling our highway network and are the first local authority in the country to take this innovative approach.

Central government requires all highways authorities to value their highway networks by 2006. The Department for Transport also requires all highway authorities to report on the progress they have made towards developing an asset management approach for their highway network.