East Sussex Highways has adopted a real-time monitoring solution to help quickly identify unplanned activity and minimise congestion across the region.
The Challenge
East Sussex Highways (ESH) is a partnership between Costain, Jacobs and East Sussex County Council and maintains over 2,000 miles of highway, covering both urban and rural areas.
ESH realised that they had a more reactive approach to traffic and incident management on the network, with a lot of route cross over, duplication of resources when reacting to issues and unnecessary fuel use. It wanted to know more about why and where the demand for traffic management was, in particular to:
- Improve speed of reaction to issues.
- Improve coordination with Highway Stewards and avoid duplication when directing resources.
- Better understand the reasons for network issues, to help with future traffic management planning.
- Reduce fuel consumption and keep CO2 emissions to a minimum.
To address this, it has adopted the real-time Network Monitor solution.
Key Benefits
Instant identification of unplanned activity and issues
Improved reaction times and coordination of resources
Identification of works occurring without permits
“The real-time Network Monitor solution has already delivered tangible benefits for East Sussex Highways. We have been able to quickly identify issues and efficiently react to these, to minimise escalation to major problems. We have even been able to identify works that do not have a permit and take any corrective action where needed – all of this means less congestion and disruption across the network.”
Network & Reactive Director, East Sussex Highways
The Solution
Network Monitor is a dashboard combining all information about planned roadworks and traffic disruptions across the local and strategic road network with an up-to-the-minute live view of traffic conditions. It highlights severe and abnormal congestion and correlates, where possible, the cause of jams against planned and unplanned disruptions such as roadworks, public events and incidents.
ESH displays Network Monitor with other live data, including CCTV and location of Highways Stewards for a comprehensive view of the road network. This has enabled instant identification of incidents and congestion, along with, where possible, its root cause in real-time. The result is quicker and more efficient reaction to unplanned activity and issues, which has helped to minimise issues escalating into more disruptive problems.
Calls to the Contact Centre has also reduced, and the instant visibility of the information means questions can be answered more accurately about the reason for any issues. This information can also be communicated quickly and widely to the public via various other websites and social media.
Further, it has also helped to identify works taking place that do not have a permit, enabling corrective action and fines.
As a forward thinking Highway Authority and based on this successful implementation, ESH has advanced its real-time capabilities with the Traffic Management Live Link add-on – a tool to create temporary traffic interventions with the unique ability to communicate road closures via sat-nav devices in real-time.
All of which is helping to keep the network flowing across East Sussex.
Please contact us for more information.
