Adverse weather plans

Winter Maintenance

We are responsible for local roads and want to do our best during bad weather to keep pedestrians safe, and to keep traffic moving and minimise delays.  The Roads and Transportation Service manages the road network with the support of our roads contracting unit.

The Scottish Executive is responsible for maintaining A77 and M77 trunk roads.  If you have any problems about these roads, call 0800 085 7136.

Winter services

Winter period

The winter period runs from 1 October to 15 May and during this period we provide 24-hour response to deal with the road network.

Winter weather prediction

During the winter period, we get a specialist weather forecast from the Meteorological Office twice a day plus updates of important changes in the forecast.  Roadside weather sensors automatically send us information that helps us monitor road surface conditions.

What we can do in freezing conditions

There are a number of different treatments:

  • Precautionary salting
    During the winter period, we try to treat all of our priority routes before temperatures drop below freezing.  Priority routes are the area’s most important roads including the A726 to East Kilbride and the A736 to Lohlibo.  We also prioritise access to fire stations, designated bus routes and routes to areas of local employment.
  • Salting roads and footways
    It is not possible for us to treat every road and footpath with salt just in case they freeze.  However, if we get a report that a road or footpath is dangerous, we will go and treat it as soon as we can.
  • Snow ploughing and clearing
    When we get a snow forecast, we fit snowploughs to the gritting lorries ready to clear the roads as soon as possible.
  • Footways
    As with roads, we make sure we treat important footways to keep them clear.  We prioritise footways around, for example, shopping centres, station approaches and schools.

Staff, vehicles and materials

Our staff are on 24-hour standby during the winter period.  To make sure we are prepared to cope with bad weather, we always test and calibrate our vehicles before the winter period.  We have bought smaller salt spreaders so we can treat narrow or congested streets.  We are now using specialist footway salt spreading and snow clearing equipment.  We keep the salt dry in a salt barn to make sure it is effective and will spread easily.  To prevent damage to vehicles or property during spreading, we are now using a smaller ground salt.

Levels or services

  • Precautionary
    We will complete precautionary salting within two hours of starting, before the roads freeze, and before peak traffic levels.
  • Reactive
    We will start treatment within one hour of an adverse weather forecast.

How you can help?

Although we provide a good service, we cannot guarantee roads will always be completely free of ice and snow.  Some roads carry such high volumes of traffic that congestion occurs at peak periods.  Sometimes freezing weather happens at the same time as peak traffic levels.  This makes it difficult for gritting vehicles to get on to the road network, leaving roads untreated and dangerous.

So, it is important to remember:

  • Access to the network by gritting vehicles is not always possible
  • Even when we have salted the roads, it takes time for it to work
  • Rain can wash the salt off roads and they may ice over again
  • In severe weather conditions, even salting will not prevent the roads from icing up.

If you are out on the roads in bad weather, please take account of the weather conditions.

Advice for drivers

  • Reduce your speed
  • Break gently
  • Increase the safety gap between you and the car in front
  • Use dipped headlights in poor visibility
  • Avoid hills if possible.

Advice for pedestrians

  • Wear sensible footwear
  • Do not go out unless it is absolutely necessary
  • Wrap up warmly.

Above all take care.

Help yourself

There are nearly 200 grit bins at places where freezing conditions cause problems throughout East Renfrewshire.  The salt inside is there for you to use to make the road or footpath safer.  You may also pick up small quantities of salt from our Thornliebank depot if you bring your own container.

Service standards

The local services provided by all council departments in East Renfrewshire have set measurable service standards.

These are designed to give local people a way of measuring where services are succeeding or failing to deliver.  These standards represent the minimum level of service you should expect from the environment department.

Our pledge to you…

We will prioritise roads and footpath maintenance and new roads and lighting projects and consider them for inclusion within the 3-year Revenue Programme or 5-year Capital Programme.

We will respond appropriately to adverse weather forecasts during the winter period and undertake gritting operations to designated priority routes before the onset of peak traffic movements.

We will respond to requests for road and footway repairs within these timescales:

  • Emergency repairs within 2 hours

  • Urgent repairs within 5 working days

  • Other repairs within 28 working days or as part of the work programme.

We will respond to requests for lighting and traffic signal repairs within these timescales:

  • Emergency repairs within 2 hours

  • Other traffic signal repairs within 48 hours.

  • Other lighting repairs within 5 working days