Kent Highway Services - The Director’s Update (Oral report)
Minutes:
(1) The Interim Director gave an oral update on some of the key issues and developments in KHS, as follows:-
(a) Staffing
Members would be aware that since the last HAB, John Hobbs had been unable to continue his work as Director of Highways Improvement for personal reasons.
We were enjoying a period of stability and were starting to reap the benefits of this – staff had welcomed job security and morale was improving. However, she recognised that many staff were still reeling from the significant change over the last four years, and she had some way to go to ensure that all staff felt happy and valued. This was understandably one of her key priorities.
(b) Transformation
We were now nearing the end of the implementation of technology planned during transformation – with streetlighting moving from their Mayrise system to the WAMS/Confirm software during January and February. Additionally Job Smart was being implemented and this would improve the programming of maintenance work and visibility of the status of fault repair to KHS staff and the Contact Centre – which would enable us to provide more information to the public about when a fault would be resolved.
A site for the West Kent depot was being actively pursued and she hoped to be able to share more details over the course of the next few months.
(c) Journey times into Maidstone
Anecdotally we had heard from a number of stakeholders - members, traders, bus operators - about the positive effect of the Traffic Management Centre and technology on journey times into Maidstone – and importantly the reliability of those journeys. We now had data to evidence this improvement with journeys taking on average 3.5 minutes per mile in the peak run up to Christmas against a baseline in 2007 of 4.2 minutes per mile.
(d) Winter service
With the cold snap greeting the New Year it was timely to give an update on the winter service, but members would be aware that preparation for winter starts in October and might have seen the press coverage or heard radio interviews with one of the supervisors for the salting teams.
Coverage was on 30% of the road network with 53 salting routes and 64 vehicles carried out salting duties. Salt was kept throughout the county for use by those vehicles. Additionally 250 snow ploughs were held by farmers in rural areas and these had been serviced ready for action.
Salting runs were up by about 50% on this time last year.
As at 5 January, between 10,000 and 12,000 tonnes of salt was held in depots with further deliveries later in the week. Members would also recall that we had started to use pre-wet salt (which basically improved stickability of the salt) and a report on this in the early summer was planned as part of the annual winter maintenance report to HAB which would be brought forward from September.
(e) LED programme
The programme to replace all traffic light heads with ... view the full minutes text for item 3