New system to better manage England’s roads

Highways England has launched a £5 million integrated weather information system developed by the Civica Group, an IT systems specialist, to enable better management of the country’s main roads during times of severe weather and support its aims of keeping the road network free flowing and safe.

Highways England operates and maintains England’s motorways and major A roads, a network that spans 4,300 miles and carries a third of all traffic by mileage and two thirds of all heavy goods traffic.

“The severe weather information service (SWIS) will provide Highways England with a single, consistent set of weather and winter treatment information to help determine and mitigate the impact of all weather events on incident management,” David O’Connor, Weather Information Services Sponsor, Highways England, told Cities Today. “The consolidated information suite will also assist us to make quality decisions in relation to the maintenance and modernisation of the network.”

The new service incorporates vehicle navigation and reporting technology, and brings together critical information on weather forecasts, road treatment plans and winter fleet data into a single system. It will help manage the risk of severe weather more effectively through improved access to real-time information.

SWIS delivers information to approximately 2,000 operational users actively working to manage and improve the performance of the road network in advance of and during severe weather conditions, including winter service providers, maintainers and control room staff.

“The main issues are typically travel congestion and road closures that are caused in some part by both routine and extreme weather events,” added O’Connor. “These can be unpredictable. While such events are often out of Highway England’s control, we can control how effective our preventative forward planning initiatives and reactive response measures are.”

The project was also supported by fleet data logging specialist Exactrak, providing real-time vehicle tracking and route navigation for drivers, to enable Highways England to monitor all treatment activity carried out by the winter maintenance fleet. The solution enables the monitoring of all activity once a vehicle has left a depot and this data is recorded in SWIS to ensure compliance and inform future planning.