Transport for London and the boroughs are thrashing out a plan for agreed, capital-wide priorities for salt spreading, to prevent a repeat of snow bringing the capital to a standstill.
Transport commissioner, Peter Hendy, wrote to the London Assembly to acknowledge that multi-agency working had not worked as it should have on the 2 February, when the majority of London’s buses ceased running.
He pledged that TfL would step in and spread salt on parts of the local road network, such as the approaches to bus garages and to hospitals, having acknowledged at the time that boroughs had ‘deployed everything they had, but it just wasn’t enough’.
But Hendy warned that the joint review of gritting priorities would have to ‘balance the need to ensure access to designated local infrastructure, such as hospitals, with the need to maintain access to the wider road network’.
It would also need to make clear ‘which organisation has responsibility and what exactly the fulfilment of those responsibilities entails’.
Boroughs had told the London Assembly’s transport committee that there had been limited information from TfL on either the situation with bus services or the priorities for gritting – necessary, they claimed, given finite resources and dwindling salt stocks (Surveyor, 5 March).
TfL said the issuing of an extreme weather alert for London should trigger the convening of multi-agency working, but that this had not happened. It would, now, ‘raise awareness of the protocol among partners’.
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