The councillor in charge of keeping Bradford’s roads open in bad weather last night admitted the network “struggles to cope” under pressure after thousands of commuters faced delays of several hours in snarled-up traffic.

Main routes into the city were brought to a standstill after an early morning flurry of snow yesterday, less than a week after the Council faced criticism over its gritting operation the last time ice and snow caused problems across the district.

Schools opened late yesterday after teachers became stuck in jams and businesses struggled as staff battled through slow-moving traffic to make it into work, prompting fears a repeat of the disruption could have a “considerable” effect on the economy.

Council gritters started work at 6am yesterday morning – an hour after the snow fell – and became stuck in gridlocked traffic.

Councillor David Green, the Council’s executive member for regeneration, economy and sustainability, said: “We had an un-forecast set of weather conditions in part of Bradford South that caught us unawares. We rely on the Met Office for forward planning but it is not an exact science.”

He said the Council’s gritters were out in force from 6am but yesterday’s problems raised a wider question about the district’s transport networks.

“There are clearly concerns about the fact Bradford’s infrastructure struggles to cope with the volume of traffic and the use it has when it is used to its fullest extent as it was this morning.

“That is a long-term problem that Bradford has talked about for years.

“It is basically a lack of investment over time, there is no short-term fix.”

He said improvement schemes including the Canal Road corridor and at Saltaire roundabout were expected to improve traffic flow.

“Any politician who would sit here and guarantee we would never be caught out by an unexpected weather pattern or guarantee there would never be an occasional problem in winter weather, they would be lying,” he said. “People are working extremely hard, long hours, trying to keep the roads in the district open and by and large they are doing a good job.”

Councillor Simon Cooke, Bradford Council’s Conservative regeneration spokesman, said: “The Council hasn’t got off to a good start in terms of gritting and reacting to bad weather. We’ve had two episodes of bad weather and both have resulted in this kind of problem.

“We get snow every winter and every winter it causes problems, but we need to get better than this, at the moment it is just not good enough.

“They need to look at ways to allow a more flexible response.”

Louise McCaul, Bradford Council’s Highways divisional manager, said a “full precautionary grit” took place at 6pm on Wednesday across the district and gritters were mobilised again at 6am yesterday.

“Every member of available staff is dealing with the snow,” she said. “We have had seven footpath gritters out in the city centre and around the district and ten footpath clearance teams dealing with problem areas.

“Refuse lorries have also been used to collect and deliver grit and mechanical diggers are clearing snow which has drifted.

“Snow and wintry weather is always likely to affect the district and, despite the huge effort we put in to limit the impact, there remains the potential for it to cause delays.”

According to West Yorkshire Integrated Transport Authority Metro, bus operators experienced “serious delays to most services”, with delays of up to an hour yesterday morning.

And Transdev Keighley took the decision to suspend some of its bus services for an hour due to the situation on the roads.

Bradford Chamber of Commerce president Stephen Wright said: “The overnight weather caused significant problems for businesses and their work forces yesterday.

“Many staff were unable to get into work on time causing downtime in production and reduced quality of service.

“Subsequent gridlock in several parts of the city consolidated the problems with the result that many businesses were playing catch up for the rest of the day.

“Staff were arriving one to two hours late while business appointments at cities such as Manchester were delayed by three hours. A repeat of this kind of disruption over successive days as we have seen for the last two years, has a considerable drag effect on the economy.”