Overview
Our Winter Service is a package of measures, primarily gritting and snow clearance, aimed at keeping public roads safe during cold, icy and snowy weather. The service prioritises routes for public transport, major roads and critical access points like hospitals.
We also provide a limited number of public salt (grit) bins for residents to use on public roads and footways.
Bury Council as highway authority has a legal duty under the Highways Act 1980, to maintain public roads.
This duty extends to ensuring safe passage on highways during snow and ice, so far as is reasonably practicable.
The duty relates to priority routes, not every single road or pavement.
Our Winter Service Team are on standby 24 hours a day from the end of October to April each year.
All residents (over 193,000 people) benefit from this service.
Key services provided
- 24/7 monitoring of the weather to decide to send the gritters out.
- Treatment (gritting) of all roads on our gritting routes.
- Maintenance of self-help salt bins.
Eligibility/criteria
Our efforts are concentrated on roads that will benefit the most people - the roads on our gritting routes. We can’t grit every road across the Bury borough or provide salt bins along every road, no council does this.
Where do we grit?
- Main A roads
- Most B roads
- Most bus routes
- Links to villages
- Emergency service locations
- Transport interchanges
- Areas around schools
- Other roads with specific problems.
Where do we provide salt bins?
Salt bins are only provided at locations away from our gritting routes at known trouble spots.
The number of bins must be limited so that we are able to maintain and re-fill them at times of need.
Service impact
Keeping Bury moving and keeping people safe is a priority. All residents benefit directly or indirectly from this service.
- 16 drivers and 4 decision makers are on a rota throughout the season ((on a single shift, the team on standby consists of 4 drivers and 1 decision maker)
- To deliver the service we maintain a stock of 2,500 tonnes of salt.
- Each time the gritters go out we treat over 142 miles of roads on our gritting routes (that’s around 35% of the total road network).
- In an average season, the service is activated over 60 times, with the gritters travelling over 13,000 miles and spreading over 2,000 tonnes of salt.
- Around 300 salt bins are also maintained at know trouble spots.
Winter Service - in pictures
Partnerships/teamwork
Bury Council works in partnership with Bolton Council to deliver its Winter Service.
We store our stock of 2,500 tonnes of salt is at Bolton Council’s depot in their salt barn, to improve opportunities for both councils to share resources when needed.
Both councils also share one spare gritting vehicle that can be used if either council experiences a vehicle breakdown.
Future plans and developments
Gritting routes and salt bin locations are reviewed annually before the start of each gritting season.