Call for School route to be gritted

Icy road Landbeach CottenhamToday I met the County Council gritting team in Witchford with fellow local Councillors. The issue at hand is the School bus route and busy road linking Landbeach and Cottenham not being gritted.

The gritting team have a budget of £2.2million per year and need to find savings of £750k. They have managed to use budgets to ensure this is now actually £450k. The savings will be found by; (1) changing leases arrangements (2) route optimisation (3) domain forecasting software that splits the County into sections. That said this would be to maintain the current service as it is. However this gives you a picture of the challenge we face to get Landbeach to Cottenham road gritted as a priority.

All routes are designated as primary (red, blue) or secondary (green) priority. With set criteria;

The next review will be sometime in 2015 where a panel will make recommendations on routes to then be signed off by a senior director at the County.

The condition of the School buses is not something covered by the gritting team. So we will need to work with Village College on this.

Currently the County treat 44% of routes (primary) compared with neighbouring areas reaching around 30-35%.

The gritting team have agreed to work up a costing for gritting the School route Landbeach-Cottenham road.

From this we can; (1) Apply political pressure for the County to again fund this route (2) Community provides the funding to reinstate (3) Community does the gritting.

Typically primary routes are gritted 40-50 times a year.

I have spoken to Steve Ellison from Cottenham Village College who is fully behind us – as this is both a safety issue and getting an education everyday for local youngsters.

I will continue to press for action.

Comments are closed.