Post Work Social Media Engagement

We recently completed some essential maintenance work on a 4½km stretch of the M62 between Junctions 37 and 38 near Balkholme in East Riding of Yorkshire. As part of our efforts to better communicate what we have done with road users – our community – which is a difficult group to connect with, we released a series of post work tweets on social media capturing what we have done and trying to relate that to language and quantities that are readily understood. Tweets included:

• The scheme saw 30 local road workers work overnight to resurface over 47,000 square metres of the M62, enough to surface the pitch at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio over 6½ times. This required over 250 lorry loads of asphalt to be delivered to the site providing a logistical challenge.
• The newly laid surfacing was finished off with over 2,250 new road studs and nearly 10 km of white lining, the same distance as Yorkshire’s own Brownlee brothers will run in the Triathlon event at the Olympic Games.

In addition, workers used the opportunity to tidy up the adjacent grass verges, cut grass and undertake important bridge inspections to minimise the need for repeat visits to the same area.

We programmed this work during the school holidays and overnight to minimise delays to road users. People don’t realise how much work we do overnight to maintain the motorways, and make sure the roads are there to use again each morning.

That’s largely down to our road workers working often unsocial hours, and careful logistics planning each night to make sure the motorway can re-open each morning.