Highways England primes market for £2bn tech spend as part of massive investment in crumbling roads network The government-owned company responsible for England's motorways has launched two streams of tendering covering nearly £2bn in spending on IT and other digital technologies. Split into two tranches, the framework agreements launched this week are prior information for the market only, with procurement set to begin in earnest …
Asset tags are pretty much already on everything - lights, bridges. Most are printed.
Some lights have tech in to power down for when they need fixing - and you can do that via API or physically there. Not a +1 on Yotta Mayrise but it's pretty comprehensive. https://weareyotta.com/software/horizons/ and they are already doing it... ( Horizons already manages over 100,000km of highway assets in the UK. It provides strategic decision support about maintenance and investment options relating to; roads and carriageways, car parks, footways, gullies and drains, signs, street furniture and more. )
EDIT: and no - don't work for them but have been an end user
They've just funded whole sections of the A31 to be tarred and chipped. A lot of it was put over tarmac that was laid less then 4 years ago and didn't need any attention.
Yet at the end of the A31 in Guildford (just before it crosses the Railway) there is a section of road that is more like a motocross track than a highway.
Numpties the lot of them.
Ah, surveys for more Smart Motorway death traps.
Yes the do need some IT but £2 billion appears a little excessive. You could fix an awful lot of stuff with that amount of cash to splurge.
Here is an idea, how about some "blue sky thinking" (or is that buzzword out of fashion now?).
What about actually building some proper cycle lanes that are separated from traffic that actually go somewhere useful. What the hell is the point of a painted white line along dual the edge carriageways like the A43 with trucks passing at 55.
Or getting rid of All Lane Running so that when you break down you are not stuck in a live traffic. Having been stuck on the M1 with a blowout and then having to sit on the embankment just waiting for the crash to happen it is really scary. When that was trailed on the M42 the refuges were quite close, maybe 500m, in all the improvements since they are 1 mile apart and worse, even after all the reports as to how dangerous it is, they are not reducing this on the ones being built now.
Or another one (Local Authority) that spent a fortune resurfacing pavement, putting new kerbs and so on then lots of white lines. The cycle route just stops and every road or access has a 6" high kerb as some genius in planning or construction did not think that bike cannot easily go up and down a 6" drop.
Rant over for they day, get another coffee!
Inflation: £2,000,000,000 would have been enough to build over 4,000 miles of Motorway back in the '50s!
see: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1964-07-07/debates/343f1525-5af1-48de-a332-7bb58fda206b/M1Motorway(ConstructionCost)
If we could just post money back in time, we could have an excellent road system now.
Interesting factoid - when you look up what a smart highway is, they claim that traffic moves faster after completing the work than it did 2 years beforehand. But wait, they had average speed checks for more than 2 years...
We regularly drive from Heathrow to the Lakes and for nearly a year there was a small digger sitting beside one stretch of the northbound M6 and I am sure it did not move. I work in the movie industry, I know set dressing when I see it.
If you look at the POPEs for any completed scheme, it is compared against the forecast outcomes during planning stage, and then "Do Minimum" (i.e. any work that would have had to have happened anyway) is subtracted. Essentially a nice big evaluation of "Did Highways England achieve what they said they would" and as can be seen by reading any of them, they certainly aren't biased in favour of Highways England.
At no point does anyone compare traffic speed post construction against traffic speed during construction and claim it as a success of benefit. ORR and Transport Focus tend to get a bit pissed off if you do things like that.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/post-opening-project-evaluation-pope-of-major-schemes
Worked as an IT contractor for HA back in the 90's
I was sure the IT Crowd was based on some of these regional IT departments antics.
including...
Testing NT4 Group Policies on staff who pissed them off the previous day
Setting the hell desk phone to fax machine as the team went to watch FIFA World Cup match down the pub
Project Managers who didn't care for anyone else except their little project and wanted all the resources IT could provide.
Just saying - it was fun at the time but looking back OMG how they got away with murder.
AC
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