New road surfacing technology comes to Bucks

Transport for Buckinghamshire’s road surfacing programme is currently in full swing. To reduce disruption, a significant proportion of the work takes place during the school holidays when the roads are at their quietest.
A new innovation – The Etnyre Chipper Spreader – is being used for the surface dressing programme this year, which has the capability to spread the treatment across a carriageway width of up to 6.1m – a 30% increase on the maximum width previously possible.
The Etnyre Chipper Spreader’s advanced on-board computer manages the rate of spread of the chippings so that material usage can be improved. The speed of the surface dressing process can also be varied, improving efficiency on roads where the machine can be fully extended.
In Buckinghamshire this means that some of the more minor roads can be treated in one pass, minimising or even eliminating joints, which reduces road closure time and improves the effectiveness of treatment.
Eurovia Specialist Treatments (EST), the contractor responsible for the surface-dressing programme, has just two crews in the country that use these machines and Transport for Buckinghamshire is delighted to be using this innovative technique on all 27 of its surface-dressing sites.
Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Transportation, Mark Shaw said: “This exciting technology is great news for us. Putting surface dressing down in one clean sweep will reduce the time on site – but more importantly, no joints means a more robust finish, which is less prone to failure, so improving value for money for us. I am really pleased this is something we have secured for use in Buckinghamshire this year”.