More than seven out ten councils say the condition of local roads, footpaths and cycleways in their areas has got worse over the last year. A report from the Institution of Civil Engineers also says local authority transport experts’ estimation of the political management of national transport issues is at an all time low.The ICE’s 2003 ‘Local Transport Survey’ has found that the road maintenance backlog has increased by about 12 per cent over the last year from 7.4 billion pounds in 2002 to 8.3 billion now. The report says, though, that detailed benchmarking is unacceptably difficult as there is no single commonly accepted method of assessing the state of the nation’s roads.The Institution says, too, that the poor state of the local highways network – on which three-quarters of all journeys are made – is being made worse by evidence that local authorities are not spending their full budget allocations on maintenance because of demand for money to be spent in other areas.
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