As a location for your average stretch of suburban black top, Pather, in Wishaw - 15 miles southeast of Glasgow – is arguably never going to make the highways maintenance list of favourite places to work. Legend has it that even the punk band The Jolt, who supported The Jam in the late 70’s, refused to play there, even though it was more or less their home town.

No disrespect intended, but Pather has a reputation for being a little rough and ready, which is why it came as no surprise to me to hear that the local council has warned it could be forced stop gritting roads because of attacks on snow-clearing workers during previous winters. In one incident a driver narrowly avoided injury when a man punched his fist through a gritter windscreen. As a result, Pather has not been gritted regularly for the past two years and the chances are it won’t be gritted again if crews and their equipment continue to be targeted.

The worrying thing is that this is not an isolated incident. Attacks on gritting crews and their equipment appear to be happening more often and even more worrying is that it appears to symptomatic of a wider problem - abuse of road workers in general. Two people working on the A370 in Somerset in October this year were physically assaulted by drivers who were angry about the road’s closure. One road worker was grabbed by the throat and had abuse shouted in his face when he told a driver the road was closed. On the same night another worker was knocked down by a man who drove his car through the barriers to hit him.  Motorist abuse towards road workers has also led to an increased police presence around the Isle of Man and the list of incidents goes on.

A survey of road workers in Scotland a few years ago, reported that 81 per cent of them were frequently abused by motorists, either physically or verbally. A third of this abuse was reported as involving acts of extreme aggression, including: food, bottles and other missiles being hurled at them from passing vehicles, and some workers said they had even been shot at with air rifles.

There have been numerous awareness campaigns since and there are several current campaigns underway to try and combat the problem, but if we are to believe industry insiders, abuse of road workers is on the increase.  HTMA has set up a special subgroup via its Safety Forum to address the issue and it will be interesting to see what the bigger picture looks like when the subgroup has had chance to assess data collected from Member Companies.

The likely outcome is that the data will show our workforce is suffering increasing regular and severe abuse from road users while carrying out vital site operations across the network.  Reports from the trenches do not suggest otherwise. In the past, media campaigns, fronted by both the public and private sector, to raise awareness of the industry-wide subject have resulted in a reduction in the number of reports of abuse, but the effect is often short lived.