Major road repairs that begin in York today (Monday) will cause significant disruption – but should last for years.
Acomb Cllr Jason Rose says the three-week scheme to resurface the length of Beckfield Lane that begins at 8am will be worth the inconvenience.
As YorkMix reported last week, the road will be shut from 8am-5pm every weekday for the work, with works expected to finish by Friday 4 September.
Cllr Rose told the Late Show on YorkMix Radio last night that it was a big project but it should fix long-standing problems.
“The road itself has needed a proper job of resurfacing,” he said “And this type of resurfacing is intensive. It has a lot of immediate impact during the work, but it lasts a lot longer for a decent number of years into the future.”
Last week Lendal Bridge had to undergo an emergency resurfacing. Is Cllr Rose hopeful the Beckfield Lane work will last?
Beckfield Lane, York
“There are a whole bunch of places where temporary patching has had to be done multiple times,” he told David Dunning.
“Beckfield Lane itself actually had temporary pothole fixes last summer, and then in the winter had to have some resurfacing done on a bit that’s now being resurfaced properly.
“So it is a repeat challenge, and that’s the case across the city. There’s not much money to go around, there’s a lot of work that needs doing.
“We’ve had austerity nationally and locally, and so all these little bits of work are kind of cheap, and don’t really do the job.
“You can still see the pothole after the pothole’s filled – whereas this is basically rebuilding the road.
“You take a lot more off the top. You do the rework properly. It’s the whole width of the road.”
Cllr Rose said scheduling the work in the school summer holidays when there was less traffic was the right thing to do.
He said: “I wish I knew about it a lot earlier, and I’m sure residents wish they had more communication earlier.
“But the good news is that it’s only a couple of weeks that each house would be impacted at a maximum, which, considering that we’ve had some roadworks that last for six months, I think, will be greatly appreciated once we get through it.”