Road between Port Glasgow roundabout and Erskine Bridge: EIR release

FOI reference: FOI/18/00285
Date received: 31 January 2018
Date responded: 26 February 2018

Information requested

How many pot holes have been filled between Port Glasgow round about and the Erskine Bridge since 01/01/2018 and 2 - How much did it cost to organise and stick names on your gritters.

Response

As the information you have requested is 'environmental information' for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the 'public interest test'. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

1. In relation to your query regarding potholes, see overleaf the number of potholes filled since 01/01/2018 on the A8 and M8 between Port Glasgow to the Erskine Bridge;

A8 westbound – 9
A8 eastbound – 0
M8 westbound – 1
M8 eastbound – 2

2. The Transport Scotland winter service runs from 1 October to 15 May. Each year we hold a Winter Service Media Launch which is the main publicity event in a programme of communications using all channels in a pro-active manner to raise awareness of the efforts that go into keeping the trunk roads moving during periods of bad weather such as rain, wind and snow.

For the 2015/16 winter season, we held our main publicity event on 12 October 2015 at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow and we also ran a competition to get local children to name one of the two gritters on display. To support this, our trunk road Operating Companies took gritters out to local schools across the country and ran a further 'name the gritter' competition as part of our education campaign. This competition to name the gritters was at no additional cost to Transport Scotland.

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