Engineers would consider the need for cleaning footway grime, repainting peeling street furniture, and clearing weeds while planning structural maintenance works under a system trialled in Warwickshire.
A number of council officials took away ~Warwickshire County Council~'s ‘streetpride’ system for scoring routes for a number of streetscene issues after it was showcased at a conference last week, while environment charity Encams was said to be enthusiastic. The system – adapted from a scoring method for rating the condition of different aspects of a bridge or structure – involves engineers undertaking site surveys in advance of structural repairs ranking other features of the route while they are there. These works are then undertaken at the same time as maintenance schemes.
Jeff Morris, assistant engineer at Warwickshire, was pleased with the level of interest in the idea at last week’s Street Scene 2006 conference.
He said afterwards: ‘Usually when you ask highways engineers back from a site visit what kind of state the streetlights were in, they’d be hard pressed to tell you whether there were any there. This is a way of ensuring all the things the public would be concerned about are addressed together.’
But there were questions over the compatibility of the drive to more effectively meet residents’ expectations on streetscene quality with the way the Government funds councils. ‘In the Government’s eyes, we have to spend our highway maintenance allocations purely on carriageway works if we’re to make improvements in roads condition.’
There were also concerns among Warwickshire engineers over whether assessing ‘periphery’ issues was an effective use of their time. But ‘streetscene continues to rise up the agenda’. In the future, councils’ highways departments could become replaced by ‘streetscene management’ departments.