Lincolnshire County Council is the first to adopt fixed penalty notices
01 May 2006
Public Private Partnership Achievement:
Lincolnshire County Council/ Ringway Infrastructure Services
Summary
Lincolnshire County Council’s Highways and Traffic Service has developed a planning and programming solution to meet the Traffic Management Act 2004. Working in partnership with roads contractors Ringway and software developers Oyster Technology, LCC has designed an innovative way to ensure that all parties work closely together. The result is a planning and programming solution to make sure that road works are well managed.
Background
Planning and programming road works has traditionally been an area where Contractors and Highways Officers alike have recognised the need for improvement. At the same time, the government believes that local Highway Authorities could manage their road network more efficiently.
For some time the government has been concerned about traffic congestion and disruption as result of Statutory Utility and Highways works. In a Department for Transport survey, 90% of respondents thought that traffic congestion and disruption was a serious problem.
Each year in the UK congestion and disruption to traffic is costing businesses and the travelling public over £15 billion in lost time and productivity. The government has recognised the importance of using the road network more efficiently by effective management and co-ordination of works, events and incidents. It has also looked to address capacity issues at a time when there are limited funds.
The Traffic Management Act 2004 was introduced to tackle congestion and disruption on the road network. Key to this was to:
‘secure the expeditious movement of traffic (including pedestrians) on its road network and facilitate the same on the road networks of others’
The Act has been implemented in stages by a series of commencement orders. In 2005, for example, a 'Network Management Duty' was placed on local authorities. This required a much more proactive and effective approach to managing what happens on the road network with improved traffic management, controlling and co-coordinating occupation of the highway (roadworks, utility works, skips, refuse collection etc), event management, incident management and parking/traffic enforcement.
In Lincolnshire, the Authority recognised the need to co-ordinate works as early as 1993 following the introduction of the New Roads and Streetworks Act 1991. This is when Lincolnshire first introduced a road space booking system. This was a crude manual system using printed maps with coloured dots referencing works from the utility New Roads and Streetworks Notices. This was developed into a spreadsheet and then a database.
In 2004, Highways Authorities were made aware that the Act would be placing a requirement on them to register their own works with parity to the utility noticing system. This would be a major challenge to the Authority.
Forward planning was key to the success of implementing these changes,
Challenge
Lincolnshire’s road contractor Ringway was faced with a growing problem of handling large amounts of maintenance projects issued to them through a term contract.
In the early days planning their resources was initially solved by the use of simple Post-it reminder notes coupled with spreadsheets. It was very haphazard and works orders were sometimes misunderstood and/or misplaced.
The current highways assessment system used to prioritise maintenance works did not have the ability to effectively forward plan and allocate resources in real-time. This meant that Ringway’s agents spent time manually entering changes to previously recorded plans. Which meant less time spent supervising works in the field.
Solution
Lincolnshire, Ringway and software provider Oyster Technology designed a partnership working arrangement as an innovative way to ensure that all parties worked closely to deliver and develop a planning and programming solution to make sure road works are well planned.
The contractor provided Lincolnshire with an agreed programme of their intention to work. With joint investment these programmes were made into a real-time system. And changes to the programme were communicated electronically using Electronic Transfer of Notice (EToN) 3 protocols into the Streetworks Registration system.
To reduce duplication, the Streetworks Registration system replaced the Road Space Booking system. There was no longer a need to enter manually the information into two systems.
With the contractor managing all the noticing, LCC did not have to employ dedicated staff to manually input and manage the dates in the Streetworks Registration System for all the Highways works. This resulted in a saving of more than over £120,000 per year in staffing costs.
With the contractor now being given the flexibility to plan and programme their own works, a second trial was undertaken where the client had control to fix and agree dates jointly with the contractor, and submit the notices on behalf of the contractor. However, the trial was fraught.
Managing multiple changes to dates and resources outside of the contractor’s control meant that some programme start dates were not adhered to. After noticing a high rate of failures, this trial was abandoned.
Instead, Oyster planning and programming software has recently been developed for EToN 4 compliance and will be EToN 5 compliant in January 2009.
A current snapshot of Ringway’s noticing performance showed that out of 145no. notices sent:
· 113no. were sent correctly
· 17no. were sent incorrectly
· 2no. were not sent
· 13no. with agreed early start
Works Orders
Major, Standard, Minor and Immediate Street works notices are handled every day. Each works order (WO) requires an advance or initial notice, a start notice and an end /stop notice. Processing up to 200 WO's per week is equivalent to a minimum of 600 notices, which is a great number to manage manually.
That’s why a planning tool that takes the complexity - and therefore the worry - out of planning and monitoring works orders was essential. Oyster ‘Master Plan’ takes data from the existing asset and maintenance management systems in the form of the weekly issue certificate report. It then electronically transfers the CSV files avoiding manual re-keying of data.
The user can take these live works orders from the pending table and allocate to the appropriate resource/gang to undertake the WO on specific days. Clashes between works orders are automatically advised and handled.
Thanks to the visible nature of Oyster ‘Master Plan’, noticing becomes a controlled and easy task.
In simple terms, the Planner is
· flexible
· takes existing data
· plans visually and independently
· uses colour to highlight issues
· provides Forward, Advance, Start & Stop noticing
· noticing is controlled and automatic
· feeds out data and notices to existing systems
· guides the user to comply with TMA
Being a system independent of the asset management or street registration system, ‘Master Plan’ can provide a tool to manage data outside of these live or active platforms. This gives the flexibility to plan irrespective of where the data has materialised and, more importantly, where it needs to go. The ability to plan ahead is now simpler. What’s more, planning is within existing live data and ad-hoc scheduling giving greater confidence for the accuracy of information viewed by the general public.
Key Features and Benefits of Oyster’Master Plan’
· In a very visual way it allows us to plan Works Orders in real-time and independent of our ‘live data’
· It will work with existing internal systems and interfaces main external providers of Streetworks registration systems
· Works orders do not have to be re-keyed, they are automatically imported from the asset management system
· Automatically produces notices for all Major, Standard, Minor and Immediate works within the correct time frame.
· Control over all works orders
· Prevents works orders not being noticed – meet KPI’s
· Alerts to overstay situations – meet KPI’s
· Saves time through limiting data entry
· Gives complete visibility of all WO’s and their status
Conclusion
The County Council is committed to making the best use of Partnerships in delivering improving services for all highway users in Lincolnshire.
We are focused on enhancing and enlarging our transport infrastructure by protecting, maintaining and promoting our existing road networks - as well as improving our strategic transport links.
Ringway Infrastructure Services is the major Highway Works Term contractor and Oyster Technology is the software house bought in specifically to develop a planning and programming solution.
Ringway works with Lincolnshire to improve and develop both organisations to provide the highest levels of service. This is done by the continual improvement of service quality especially in terms of reducing congestion and disruption.
A key objective of the partnership is to successfully implement the TMA Act 2004, as this directly affects the delivery of the Network Management Duty (NDM). The implications for failure on the Highway Authority (HA) can be severe. The Secretary of State for transport can intervene and appoint a traffic director if the HA fails to fulfil its NMD.
Therefore it was vital that Lincolnshire and Ringway work together to ensure delivery of the NMD. It is clear that Ringway’s performance reflects on LCC. This could not be dealt separately and collaborative working is necessary.
Good communication and the transfer of information electronically was a key factor. With the right partners and the right innovative software, meeting the TMA challenges and demonstrating parity can be achieved.
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