Vehicle movements and deliveries at construction sites

Good practice

Reverse alarms

Where you use wagons to remove material from site, consider providing an area where they can turn around without needing to reverse. This will remove the need for a banksman and will reduce the noise from reverse alarms.

Use an appropriate route

Ensure that employee and delivery vehicles, where possible, use only major roads.

Make smaller villages, residential areas and routes that pass schools 'no go' routes for construction traffic. This will help to reduce the level of disturbance and concern felt by local communities.

Public concerns can be further reduced by making sure that delivery drivers and employees drive below the speed limit, particularly in built up areas.

For some major developments, your local council may use planning conditions to specify routes to be used in order to minimise disruption to local communities and businesses.

Keep roads clean

Ensure that construction vehicles have clean wheels before they access public highways and that they do not drop mud or other debris onto public roads. For certain types of developments this may be specified in the planning consent from your local council.

Where the spoil from your operations is slurry or is very wet, use wagons with tailgate seals to prevent leaks onto roads. Check that all handles on the tailgate are locked in place. If they are not, the seal will not be effective.

Run-off from site roads can contain oil and diesel, as well as high levels of silt. If contaminated water enters surface water drains or watercourses you could be prosecuted for causing pollution. You must take steps to prevent this. These could include:

• using a road sweeper to keep tarmac roads clean
• using cut-off trenches adjacent to unmade haul roads to channel water to settlement lagoons
• using sand bags or straw bales to form a barrier along unmade haul roads.

Watch our short videos:

Good practice on a construction site

How to manage traffic on a construction site

Further information

Pollution incident response planning

Road sweepers at construction sites

Wheel washing at construction sites