Road Resurfacing in Bradenstoke

A message regarding the recent road resurfacing in Bradenstoke:

Surface dressing is an early intervention treatment to seal up the road, add texture and prevent it from failing further to the point that it needs expensive resurfacing. It is often questioned due to the road looking ‘good’ at the point of intervention. Often there are 3 or 4 applications of dressing to a carriageway before they reach the point where a resurfacing course is required due to the diminishing kerb upstands and thresholds

Hollow Way had an old surface dressing on it which had reached end of life, with the dressing stripping off the road in places. To prevent further deterioration due to water ingress the road was patched last autumn in the areas that needed it and dressed this summer.

Surface dressing is carried out on roads where we need to prevent deterioration, there is a small window of opportunity for this as it only takes a few years for water to enter the road surface and make it crack and degrade. Once this starts to happen the road will need resurfacing.

Resurfacing is a very expensive and disruptive process, it also uses valuable resources from raw aggregate to imported bitumen, these have a very high carbon footprint and where possible we try to stop the use of raw materials.

Machine laid resurfacing where we remove the top surface and lay a new one is carried out on surfaces that are cracked and failing, they normally start to show significant potholes or ravelling where the chippings become detached from the rest of the surface and create shallow patchy areas along the wheel tracks. This is the point where it is preferable to undertake surfacing schemes, that have caught the road before degradation starts in the lower areas, which becomes very expensive with deep excavations and long closures.

Resurfacing schemes will be carried out in priority order from the A roads to the Unclassified Roads, with this being a C road if it was allowed to degrade to the point of requiring surfacing it would be a long way down the priority list for resurfacing when compared to other roads within the area board and Wiltshire. The dressing will keep it in a good condition rather than allowing it to degrade to poor or very poor before it gets a full resurface.

The dressing may look rough for the first few months until it has time to bed in then it will look like a normal road as it did in recent years.

There are several stages of sweeping and aftercare that happen after the dressing is laid to remove excess chippings and make sure that the surface performs well.