Roads, highways and pavements

The Highways Act 1980 requires the Council to maintain the condition of all highways for which it has a responsibility to allow for the safe and effective movement of people and goods.

Agency	Responsibility
	All motorways and trunk roads, e.g. A1(M), A19(T), A64(T), A64(T) etc.
	All other A, B and C class roads and most unclassified roads; some unclassified roads (e.g. residential streets, access roads on Industrial estates) are the responsibility of adjacent properties, landlords etc and not the County Council.

The highway network the County Council manages is vast:

There are over 5,500 miles of roads and 2,600 miles of footways. If our roads and footways were laid end to end they would stretch a third of the way around the Earth, reaching Darwin in Australia.
Over 2,000 bridges
45,000 streetlights
Over 300 traffic signal installations

The responsibility to manage the highway network includes the following:

resurfacing and repairing the highway
salting and gritting the highway in the winter
maintaining street lighting and lighting on signs and bollards
traffic regulation and traffic calming schemes
managing streetworks by other companies such as utilities who are working on roads and pavements
parking, including vehicular crossings
maintaining traffic signals including pedestrian crossings
developing transport policy
road safety and accident reduction
bridge maintenance and improvement
maintaining a register of adopted roads
new works and scheme design
traffic management and reducing traffic congestion

The County Council expects to have approximately £55m available to deliver the highways service over the next four years. This must be used to fund both:

Highway improvements - a range of schemes to improve infrastructure for road users across North Yorkshire.
Highway maintenance - delivering the statutory duty to maintain the highway network in a safe and suitable condition.

Online mapping

You can find a range of information about the services we provide by using our online mapping.

[Launch roads mapping]