Is it just in Surrey the councils are too lazy to clean the roadsigns? Just lately I've noticed how dirty a large majority are, covered in green slime and muck, some almost unreadable. A proportion are also obscured by hedges and overgrown trees.
I tried letting my council know my views through their website, but nothing was ever heard back.
Does your county council spend money cleaning the road signs in your area?
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No, but even more of a problem is the failure to cut the grass at junctions and roundabouts. Some grass on verges round here is over a metre high.
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Same in my neck of the woods, potholes, roads crumbling.
There's a classic at the junction of our lane with the main road. Underneath both roads is a drainage system critical to preventing flooding, the road is subsiding into a now noticable dip. Little holes have now appeared suggesting further collapse, these holes have now been filled in with a dollop of tarmac.
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My council don't! When I was in Germany I saw a specially adapted Unimog vehicle with water and rotating brushes and that went round cleaning the roads signs plus a double rotating brush for doing the vertical plastic markers on bends and verges.
{8< SNIP 8< last paragraph removed as off topic and non relevant - DD}
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No idea how grubby the signs are around here as all the trees now overhang the signs. Carn't even see the signs let alone any dirt. Do the local authority have a legal obligation to keep ALL the signs visable or are some signs purely advisory.
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Wow, a fast response (after I'd prefixed it that no reply last time).
From: Stephen Fuggles [mailto:removed - DD]
Sent: 08 June 2006 14:30
To: Mutton Geoff
Subject: Road Signs
Dear Mutton Geoff
I refer to your message today on this subject.
Surrey County Council (SCC) is the highway authority and is responsible for most of the traffic signs including direction, warning and regulatory signs, such as those for speed limits, in Surrey.
I have passed your message to the SCC North West Surrey Transportation Service at Quadrant Court, 35 Guildford Road, Woking, GU22 7QQ. Tel 0845 6 009 009 E-mail nwareahighways@surreycc.gov.uk.
I have asked them to reply to you direct regarding these signs.
Runnymede Borough Council (RBC) is responsible for street name plates. There is no regular cleaning programme for these signs as this would be extremely expensive and unnecessary as, in most cases, these signs do not tend to get very dirty. The Council has a continuous programme of street nameplate renewal and the new signs are made from recycled plastic. As well as being more environmentally friendly they are also ?self cleaning?, that is that the rain cleans the surface. I appreciate that we have not experienced much rain recently but very few signs are illegible, unless they need replacing. It is helpful if the public let us know if they see a particular sign that is damaged or dirty by e-mailing a message to technical@runnymede.gov.uk.
RBC also carries out on-street parking enforcement on behalf of SCC and maintains the small signs that indicate parking restrictions. Again, there is no cleaning programme but the signs do not usually get very dirty.
I hope that this information is of help to you.
Yours sincerely
Stephen Fuggles
Head of Engineering
Runnymede Borough Council
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That's quite a decent letter from them, they're quite right it's Surrey County you need to contact.
SCC are strapped for cash, and highways are always a low priority compared to the likes of Education, where expenditure has to be "passported" though to these service areas.
I think you're going to have to chip away at the dirty signs/ overhanging trees one at a time, maybe involving your local/county councillor for extra clout.
They will have a duty to act.
hth
Ian
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In fairness to the guy you should lock his e-mail address out {Have done - DD} . Good response though. I had a falling out yesterday with some jobsworrth in Highways over road repairs.
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A few years ago I was driving along the South coast and somewhere near Bournemouth or maybe Christchurch I spotted a chap up a ladder cleaning the signs at a large roundabout junction. His old Escort van was nearby complete with the name of his cleaning company. I just assumed that he was a one man business doing work for the local council. I haven't seen this sort of thing being done anywhere else. Have any other backroomers ?
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"In fairness to the guy you should .."
While agreeing with all that has been said, this is the time of year when everything green grows at an alarming speed. Even by diverting the bin crews for a week it would be impossible to deal with the new growth round all the signs. And I suspect that faced with this choice, we might prefer our bins emptied? ;o)
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I regularly drive the length of the M1 during the night. Once you get up towards the top, in Yorkshire, some of the overhead gantry signs become more or less unreadable due to odd lighting. It's not dirt or anything like that, the lights on the gantries simply create a kind of black-and-white alternating pattern on the signs which always leaves me struggling to read them. It's not a problem I've ever seen on other motorways - a case of installing some nice new lights then not bothering to check they work I think! To be fair, it's not that they don't work, just that they are installed in the wrong pattern, or they're not big enough.
The best signs are the ones that are covered by trees and plants on the side of the road, both on motorways and elsewhere. Makes you wonder why they bother putting signs up if they're not going to cut down the vegetation around them!
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