The importance of long-term roadway maintenance: TotalEnergies features in Project Scotland

TotalEnergies has been featured in the May 2023 issue of Project Scotland, discussing the importance of long-term roadway maintenance to tackling the blight of potholes impacting Scottish roadways.

Drawing on TotalEnergies own portfolio of market leading bitumen products,  Richard Ashton, Market Development Manager for Bitumen, explores the importance of investing in preventative management and material strategies.

The impact of increasingly volatile weather conditions is having a noticeable effect on Scottish roads, with figures released in 2022 estimating the total funding required to address potholes and bring the roads up to standard to be in excess of £1.7 billion. Austere budgets and extreme climate variations are putting pressure on ageing roadways not designed to accommodate such fluctuations. While winter brings with it wetter conditions, cold snaps, and a fresh batch of potholes, increasingly hot summer temperatures are softening the bitumen, creating road deformations which undermine its load bearing capacity.

This has resulted in a cycle of degradation and managed decline leading to an ever-increasing number of defects and potholes, a spiralling backlog of works required, and a growing strain on local authority resources – both in time and cost – to manage these issues. 

Short-term road work solutions or remedial strategies are not sufficient to fix the problem. Rather, a long-term view of highways asset management is needed in order to futureproof roads and reduce reliance on costly, disruptive, reactionary interventions.

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