Safety
Doing things differently with technology and innovation – Keith Smith, Chevron Group
Keith Smith, Chief Engineer for the Chevron Group explains how innovative thinking, digital technology and industry collaboration has resulted in a new way of managing Mobile Carriageway Closures. We have to change the way we think about roadworks if we want to change...
Five trends impacting the future of highways – Andy Theobald, Mott MacDonald
If we want our road infrastructure to be fit for the long term, we must keep pace with the key drivers affecting the highways industry, says Andy Theobald. Providing our clients with long-term solutions means looking ahead, taking a 10 to 20-year time horizon to...
Getting the strategic road network ready for autonomous vehicles calls for collaboration – Joanna White, National Highways
Joanna White, Roads Development Director at National Highways, outlines the importance of collaboration and information sharing to successfully implement connected services. Vehicles are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, designed to keep us safer and make our...
The future of mobility is safer (and how we get there) – Jillian Kowalchuk, Safe and the City
Jillian Kowalchuk, Founder of Safe and the City explains how software and AI can help people feel safer when using the transport network Most people think of Safe & the City as just an app, but that isn’t the full picture. There’s more behind our technologies,...
Could 5G connectivity be the changemaker technology for road safety? – Dr Dimitrios Kaltakis, WSP
Dr Dimitrios Kaltakis, 5G and connectivity lead at WSP, outlines how network operators, vehicle manufacturers, and road operators must work together to achieve Vision Zero. As digital connectivity becomes increasingly vital – not just for the smooth but for the safe...
Do standards stifle innovation? – Andy Fish, 3M
Andy Fish, technical specialist for 3M's Transportation Safety Division, looks at how to encourage innovation in a regulated market. As someone who has sat on many standard setting committees and industry bodies, across several industries, I have often pondered why...
Attracting new labour into highways – Ben Rawding, JCB
Ben Rawding from JCB stresses the importance of new technologies to tackle the labour shortages and attract new talent to the sector. Today the highways teams within British local authorities face a number of challenges, and as an industry we must do more to support...
Could innovations in wireless communications be the key to better roadworker safety? – dBD Communications
Brooke Wood from dDB Communications emphasises the need for investment in wireless communications to improve roadworker safety. Every day and night, over 3,000 highways engineers work across the UK’s 670-mile network of motorways and A-roads to keep our roads safe and...
Is health, safety and wellbeing really protecting our worker’s health? – Steve Perkins
Steve Perkins, Managing Director at Steve Perkins Associates, unpacks the big picture of workplace health and argues the ‘system’ for protecting worker health is flawed, particularly in the world of construction. “What gets measured gets managed" So said Peter...
Achieving zero harm on roads across Europe – challenges for the next five to ten years
Delivering Vision Zero will be challenging and resource intensive. The timeframe for delivery also requires focus on what matters most in reducing the number and severity of casualties says Jeremy Phillips, leader of CEDR’s Working Group on Road Safety The ambition to...
Embedding a decarbonisation culture into the highways sector
We need to see a cultural change towards approaches to carbon, says John Dixon, Jacobs’ Vice President and Highways Market Director, and we should take inspiration from the transformationl improvements in safety achieved within the sector over the last 20 years Over...
Supporting mental health with ‘One Million Lives’
Fiona O’Donnell, Jacob’s Head of Health, Safety and Environemnt (HSE) outlines her organisation’s efforts to break down the barriers that hinder honest conversations about mental health and encourage an open culture of support around the globe Fiona O'Donnell, Jacobs...
How vehicle sensor data is underpinning a revolution in road safety
Steve Birdsall, CEO of Gaist, provider of roadscape insight and intelligence services, explains the very real possibility of a revolution in road safety In the past decade, the role of data within the built environment has changed dramatically. An explosion in the...
The hidden pandemic – workplace health risks in highways
Covid-19 has thrown the issue of workplace health into the spotlight. But in the highways sector, which has a heady cocktail of exposure hazards from manual handling to bitumen fumes, the control of workplace health risks has long been the Cinderella to accident...
UK Connected and Automated Mobility Roadmap to 2030
Author: Mark Cracknell - Head of Technology, Zenzic What is the roadmap? Roadmaps provide a blueprint of the future. They offer an idea of what the future will hold, creating valuable insight into what different capabilities are on the horizon, and indeed when they...
Why language matters in the self-driving revolution
Author: Daniel Ruiz - Chief Executive, Zenzic Hopefully you've picked up on the relaunch at the beginning of this month (May) of Meridian Mobility as Zenzic. Set up in 2017 with its roots in both the Departments for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and for...
Invest today to deliver the highway infrastructure of tomorrow
The UK's strategic road network is one of its most valuable national assets, key to our economic growth. Four million people use Highways England's strategic road network each day, and this is forecast to grow by over 40% by 2040. Just as an effective roads network is...
Joining up the good work
The highways sector has so far failed to move on from its traditional, largely manual ways of working. We have seen productivity flatline for over 20 years, struggled to deliver better customer service and communications and still impact the health, safety and...
Listening to the road user
Adopting the maxim "what gets measured gets managed" implies by association that what hasn't been tracked or measured properly is missed and consequently doesn't get managed effectively. In the transport sector, listening to the views of passengers and other road...
Taking a Human Factors Approach to Intelligent Mobility
Intelligent Mobility - a silver bullet? Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and the new public transport models and powertrain technologies which are developing with them, are regularly positioned as the solution to a wide range of societal challenges ranging...
