20 WINTER MAINTENANCE
DECEMBER 2013
Sweeping wintry weather away
Graham Howlett, UK sales and marketing manager at Johnston Sweepers, discusses the importance of keeping roads clear of snow and ice
You would think we would be used to it now – every autumn our roads are covered in fallen leaves, compacting as they are driven over and becoming more slippery as they get wet. And yet, every single year the leaf season causes a seasonal upsurge in road accidents, in spite of stepped-up sweeping programmes put in place by local authorities to mitigate the problem.
The number of accidents on Britain’s roads leaps by an average of 15 per cent every October, according to fi gures from the Department for Transport, with deaths caused by road accidents also soaring by around 14 per cent. It’s not just the piles of slippery leaves themselves that cause the accidents – the problem is exacerbated by the fact that they obscure road markings, potholes and even kerbs, creating potentially lethal road situations.
Keeping roads clear Removing leaves before roads and pavements turn into ice rinks is an annual headache for local authorities. Some choose to draft in teams of people with brooms to collect them by hand, others will take the opportunity to hire in extra road sweepers. There’s no doubt that removing them with a sweeper is the fastest way to get the job done, covering a wide area in a short space of time, and Johnston’s VT651 is the ideal machine for the task. Its sweep gear has been specially designed to prevent “bulldozing” of leaves as they are collected, which can result in machines simply pushing the leaves along the road. The design of the sweep gear is crucial to the effi ciency of leaf collection and Johnston’s has been engineered to allow the leaves to enter the nozzle as they are swept into the machine, ensuring success at fi rst pass.
Local authorities determine their sweeping frequency based on a raft of factors, including weight of traffi c, pedestrian footfall, commercial profi le, and cost. For some, this means sweeping twice or even three times a day, the City of Westminster being a prime example with Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street being busy both day and night. Rural areas, by defi nition, are swept the least and this is refl ected in the accident statistics. More incidents happen on rural roads than on urban streets, and there are twice the number of fatalities, according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA).
Preparing for winter
The unpredictability of the British winter weather is the prime cause of the other major headache for local authorities – snow. With depot space at a premium and budgets cut to the bone, holding equipment to be instantly ready for our occasional but troublesome snowfall is not easy. One way to overcome this is to double up the functions of existing vehicles, and Johnston has engineered the ideal solution with a range of super-quick demountable winter packs available across its compact sweeper range, including the C400 midsize, CN101 sub compact and the latest C201 compact.
The winter pack options, which include snow plough, snow brush and gritter unit, can be fi tted in less than 10 minutes at the fi rst sign of snow or ice, and removed just as quickly when normal sweeping duties are required. The switchable functions mean that machines can double up as sweepers or snow clearing vehicles without all the expense, storage problems and utilisation issues of holding two separate units.
The pack features three optional pieces of kit. There’s a 1.6m snow blade, which can slew right, left, or straight ahead via the in-cab control, and which is suited to any type of road condition thanks to its pendulum suspension system. There is also a 1.5m snow brush option, brand new to Johnston’s winter range. The effi cient spiral brush unit can be slewed right and left to allow full-width road clearance, all controlled from inside the cab. Completing the pack is a 200L gritter unit mounted to the sweeper. With electronically controlled metering from inside the cab, grit can be dispensed for a 1.2m spread width, suitable for most pavements – or, via a special spinner unit, up to 6m for car parks and roads.
Johnston’s winter equipment can be retro-fi tted to maximise the multi-task versatility of existing sweeper fl eets, the clear solution for fl eet operators under pressure to be ready for every road clearing situation at a minute’s notice.
www.highwaysmagazine.co.uk
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