Coventry City Council is set to invest almost £20m improving roads and pavements in the next financial year.
The ambitious plans cover more than 160 projects that include repairing and maintaining the city’s roads and pavements, improving flood protection and investing in road safety schemes to help reduce road collisions.
The money will be used to improve the worst affected roads and pavements, including repairing potholes and ensuring that drivers and pedestrians can use routes safely.
The plan is to carry out work to repair roads on a worst first basis while at the same time investing in measures including the repair of kerb lines, junction improvements and installing bollards and laybys, all measures that will help to extend the life of road repairs.
This work will help to ensure the city’s road network is ready to support a wide range of pioneering projects including Coventry Very Light Rail, All Electric buses and more fully segregated cycleways to support active travel as well as tackling the causes of climate change whilst promoting growth and investment across the city.
Councillor Patricia Hetherton, Cabinet Member for City Services said: “I think all residents will welcome this city-wide programme of improvements to the worst affected roads, pavements and drains.
“The additional funding is a welcome boost and we will target it to help provide reliable transport routes that make it as easy as possible, especially for vulnerable for people, to continue getting out and about in their local areas. A great way of doing this is to improve the quality of pavements across the city so I am pleased to say that this area will get more funding.
“Of course, although we will carefully target this investment it isn’t really enough for us to do everything that we would like, so will continue to make the case for more from government. Added to this, in the last year alone, the cost of materials has gone up by 12% so we will also continue to be smart and innovative in our approach – pioneering green solutions and the use of the pot-hole pro machine which has really helped us to target potholes across the road network.
“The programme ties in the Council’s wider aims to tackle climate change by improving traffic flow, reducing congestion and supporting the decarbonisation of the transport system.”
