A16 from Spalding to Peterborough was ‘set up for failure’ - How underinvestment, historic decisions, geology and climate change are causing problems for Lincolnshire’s roads

The £80 million A16 link to Peterborough was always ‘set up for failure’ according to highways chiefs who have pointed out a series of factors that underpin our area’s road woes.

The road south of Spalding only opened in 2010 but has recently been beset by a number of issues - with dips and potholes as it struggles to cope with the level of traffic. It’s now said that geological issues on the route, which was mired in controversy before it was built, were always going to be an issue.

Highways officers have been working with geological experts to look at how to combat conditions in our low-lying area, with ground movements causing headaches and making it tricky to build roads that can stand up to heavy use and climate change.

A senior councillor, however, says the area is also being held back by historic decisions that failed to establish a road network fit for the current day - and ruled out the long-held ambition of upgrading key routes to dual carriageways, saying the £20 million-a-mile cost is prohibitive.

Richard Davies, Lincolnshire County Council’s executive councillor for Highways, Transport and IT says the country’s second largest county faces a number of challenges.

“We are a big network, that makes a difference. We’re the fourth biggest network in the country, so that’s a significant player,” Coun Davies said, pointing out the differences between Lincolnshire and its neighbours.

“Compared to the West Midlands, we don’t have lots of trunk roads and motorways and that means our normal road network has to take a lot of the heavy lifting.

“Whereas if you compare that with somewhere like Staffordshire, which in many aspects is rural, they have a lot of motorways that takes a lot of the traffic off.

“In the South Holland and Spalding area the A17, A16 are the busiest and most significant roads.

“There is no motorway and if people 30-40 years ago had made different decisions there might have been. There certainly isn’t now. That does hold us back.”

Coun Davies was referring to plans stretching as far back as the 1970s which had wanted to extend the M11, which runs from London to Cambridge, all the way through the backbone of Lincolnshire.

“It was before my time so I can’t comment in any detail, but the suggestion was the M11 would have come all the way up to Humber,” Coun Davies added.

“Unfortunately that debate is lost.”

Coun Davies also pointed to the National Highways consultation on re-trunking roads and the ‘poignant fact’ that ‘there's a massive gap as they don’t look after any in Lincolnshire’.

With the large volume of HGVs and agricultural vehicles - not to mention caravans heading to the coast - using our roads on a daily basis, the area’s roads suffer plenty of wear and tear.

And this problem is only exacerbated by the area’s network suffering historical constraints, often due to issues such as the county’s network of drains, rather than being constructed in the manner many newer roads are.

“What it does show,” Coun Davies added, “is that we just don’t have the substantive road network that other places have.

“You layer on top of that the issue of 50-60 years of lack of investment from various national Governments, regardless of political view, and you put on top of that the way our roads are designed.

“Nobody put two lines in the sand and said ‘this is where we want the roads to go’. They developed organically, so that puts us in a difficult place compared to areas in the world where they’re building predominantly new roads.

“The reality is a lot of our roads people use on a daily basis are tracks, farm tracks, mud tracks, drovers’ roads that over the years have become more to standard, rather than somebody saying ‘we want a road from Sutton Bridge to Holbeach’.

“If you're doing that from scratch designs you construct it, where the reality is that you’re, to a large extent, pootling around on roads that aren’t new and by happenstance become roads.”

Despite recent calls to make the A16 and A17 trunk roads and a county council newsletter recently suggesting the A16 could one day become a dual carriageway, Coun Davies believes that would not be the priority.

He continued: “Dual carriageways aren’t the answer.

“Even if we’re talking hypothetically we have to include an element of realism. To build a dual carriageway is approaching £20m per mile, so let’s introduce an element of realism.

“If we had that kind of money to spend on Lincolnshire’s infrastructure I wouldn’t start by building dual carriageways.”

The issues the county faces were recently highlighted in a paper by Mark Heaton, programme leader - surfacing and patching at Lincolnshire County Council.

Speaking at the UK Road Conference earlier this year, he labelled the A16’s stretch between Spalding and Crowland as being ‘set up for failure’ because of a cocktail of factors.

He warned of ‘high susceptibility to ground movement due to the underlying geology’ where deposits such as peat, tidal flat deposits and alluvium ‘have a high susceptibility to compress, particularly when loaded, or through loss of water content driven by climate change’.

“The shallow foundations of Lincolnshire’s rural ‘evolved’ roads increases their vulnerability to ground movement, leading to road damage” Mr Heaton added.

“Types of damage include longitudinal cracking, edge failure, and uneven long section profiles.

“Through knowledge exchange, data sharing and collaboration between the British Geological Survey and Lincolnshire County Council, a direct relationship between road condition and geohazard susceptibility has been demonstrated; showing compressible ground had a greater correlation with road damage than originally considered.”

Mr Heaton added ‘there is an urgent requirement to build resilience and improve life expectancy of the nation’s roads’.

His report discussed Lincolnshire County Council trialling steel mesh across the width of roads, which leads to less surface cracking.