Maintaining our roads and highways
We maintain 3,000 miles of road as well as measures that help us move safely and efficently.
On this page
We monitor and maintain almost 3,000 miles of roads – it’s our job to make sure they are safe to use and do the job they should. You can find out about current and future roadworks on our dedicated roadworks pages.
The larger roads or trunk roads, such as the M40 and A34, are the responsibility of National Highways.
Road features
We're also responsible for maintaining many road and footpath features that help us move safely and efficiently.
- 1,979 miles of footpaths and cycleways
- 60,327 street lights
- 59,724 traffic signals)
- 3,531 structures or bridges
- 18,843 smaller structures like footpath signs, stiles, gates, and bridges
- 167,811 road drains
Got a question about something you’ve spotted? Take a look at our street maintenance guide or report it on Fix My Street.
We plan and prioritise road maintenance
Throughout the year, we plan inspections and surveys to ensure that we stay on top of everything. We go through a prioritisation process because we can’t inspect everything, every year.
A maintenance plan, delivered in partnership with other companies, ensures we work to fix what we have found.
If you are aware of a problem, you can report it using Fix My Street.
Where we have specific concerns about the condition of a section of road or a footpath, for example, we add them to a red list. They receive a priority focus.
In 2023-24, we resurfaced 850,000m² of road, and 80,000m² of footway or the equivalent of 130 Premier League-sized football pitches.
How do we work out what order to fix things in?
The process is broadly split into two phases:
Currently 13.1% of our road network is identified as being in poor condition. That is better than the English average of 18% but is still something we work to improve within our budgets.
Take a look to see what's involved in maintaining our roads
Grasscutting
Have you ever wondered why the grass on the highways is cut the way it is?
Find out more about how grass verges are maintained.
Transcript of grass cutting video
My name is Paul Wilson, I’m group manager of Oxfordshire County Council area operations.
From a safety point of view, we cut the junctions and a visibility space first off in the season. This normally happens around about May.
It very much depends on the growth and then we work then through, again thinking about safety onto the footway and cycle networks so that we can promote our active travel programme as well.
And then we move onto the other rural and urban areas of highway grass and this will generally take place from mid way through July through to September, October time, again depending on growing season.
the way we cut is within the urban areas, ie the built up areas, we cut all of the highway grass so the full width, but out on the rural network we just cut a one metre swathe – this again will leave plenty of verge for biodiversity and wildlife and wild flower growth.
Oxfordshire County Council are responsible for cutting all of the grass associated with the public highway. That means we’re not responsible for green open spaces generally, they’re normally managed by district councils or town councils or parish councils.
Gully cleaning
Transcript of gully cleaning video
The video has no spoken words but does have the following captions:
Keeping the drains on our road clear.
We regularly assess and clean road drains across the county.
Step one: We use a high pressure water hose jet and a good old fashioned spade to remove the debris.
Step two: We then suck the water and silt out using a vacuum.
We recycle 99 percent of what we clean out.
Found a blocked drain? Report it on Fix My Street.
Gritting our roads
Transcript of gritting our roads video
The video has no spoken words but does have the following captions:
Gritting our roads.
We usually grit our roads from 1 November to 31 March.
Each route usually takes around three hours.
We start the precautionary routes in good time.
Prior to the forecast, road temperatures reaching zero.
We salt those roads that have lots of traffic or are known problem areas for ice.
Salt bins for footpaths are provided so we can all help keep each other safe on icy footpaths.
This is because our priority has to be the roads.
Take a look at how we keep our roads clear of ice and snow during winter maintenance
How road maintenance is paid for
We receive two different types of funding for maintenance:
- Our annual capital budget is approximately £43M, around £19M of which is funded from the Department for Transport, and the rest is topped up from council reserves.
This is used for our annual maintenance programme. This type of work is often more involved and should mean the problem is rectified for at least five years.
- Our annual revenue budget is approximately £19M and is funded through council tax.
This is used for day-to-day activities, routine work and reactive repairs – these generally are only designed to resolve an issue for up to five years.
Savings
We’re always looking for ways to save money and improve how we work.
Our efficiency saving in 2022/23 was £1,015,534. From 2013/14 to 2022/23, total efficiency savings were £23,400,290.
That means we have saved on average £27 per km per head of Oxfordshire’s population.
Ongoing delivery
This budget goes to the ongoing delivery of a wide range of maintenance:
- 405 miles (13%) of our roads* and 596 miles (30%) of our footways and cycleways are red condition which are prioritised for checking.
- repairing approximately 37,000 potholes in 2024
- fixed 3,600 drain defects in 2023/24, which caused 395 floods.
- Assessing for maintenance and introducing enhanced monitoring on a proportion of the 22% of structures, 18% of public right of way structures identified as being at risk.
- 15% of our streetlighting and 21% of traffic signal identified as potentially requiring maintenance