A CENTRE WORTH WAITING FOR
Establishing the national traffic control centre may have been held up but, as Luke Walsh finds out, it is now working hard to remove delays on the strategic highways network.
It may have suffered some delays before its inception, but the multimillion-pound national traffic control centre is now making its mark on the country's most congested roads. Opened in March, the £160m centre near the M5 at Quinton, Birmingham, oversees traffic on the 7,300 kilometres of England's motorways and trunk roads. Its primary role is to manage traffic flows and give motorists up-to-the-second travel information about roads and, to a lesser degree, public transport.
The centre has become a central information point for the motorway and turnk road network, collecting real-time information from 3,750 road sensors and 700 CCTV cameras, as well as reports from the Highways Agency traffic officers, police forces, local highway authorities, contractors, leisure and entertainment venues and weather centres.
This real-time information is then made available to drivers through the 24-hour automated telephone service, and regional radio and television broadcasts, as well as the Highways Agency prototype infomration points at 24 Welcome Break motorway service stations and four freight stops across England.
This week, the centre will also officially launch a trial of on-route display of real journey times. The trial is being run on the Birmingham and Stoke sections of the M5 and M6 motorways to deal with congestion, and to tackle problems caused by the thousands of motorists that use the routes at this time of year for holiday travel.
Information, displayed on variable-message signs from Stoke along the M6 to the junction with the M1 and down the M5 to Bristol - a total distance of 160 miles along two sections of central England's busiest motorway routes - is designed to tell drivers how long it will take them to travel from where they see the sign to their destination junction. The system has been operating for the past two weeks and is due to run until September.
Steve Crosthwaite, head of the centre, explains: "The system uses the current VMS above the highway, and the public's health and safety are always in our thoughts so we will also check to make sure drivers are not over-loaded with information.
"If they miss something on a sign, it will be easy for them to pick it up at the next one; he says, adding that the signs are placed at 'key decision points' although there is no set distance between each one.
The decision to invest in the real-time information came after a survey carried out for the Highways Agency at the launch of the centre discovered around 77% of drivers did not plan their journeys. Consequently, the success of the trial, or the lack of it, really depends on whether the public find it useful; Crosthwaite says.
"If they do, it is something we will look at rolling out across the country. I hope this won't take years but, if we get parliamentary approval quickly, it could be in place by 2007."
Currently, the centre is exploring a number of other new initiatives, which it is piloting across the country. These are all aimed at achieving the centre's main goals of reducing congestion and improving journey times.
It is already trialling digitial and internet radio options in order to offer drivers more access to information. The internet radio is being used in the Birmingham area, and digital audio broadcasting (DAB) in the Bristol region. As with the trial of on-route display of real journey times, success of both radio trials will be gauged on whether the public tune in. In the end, the idea will be either rolled out to more areas or scrapped.
The Highways Agency is, according to Crosthwaite, still 'looking into' the possibility of getting an FM radio licence, but there is a two-year waiting list.
The centre already provides information on travel conditions and, through 350 VMS around the network, will give drivers the opportunity to change route if there is a problem ahead.
A further 1,400 safety signs can be used to manage local traffic in the event of incidents and emergencies, in order to provide warnings of stationary or slow-moving traffic, protecting those at the back of queues.
Although the centre had its first real test during the Easter holidays this April, the history of the centre goes back much further.
In 2001, it was announced that a contract to develop a national traffic control centre for England's strategic network was to be awarded the following year - 12 months later than originally planned. The contract was subsequently awarded later the same year on a 10-year basis, to last until 2011.
However, as this included almost 30 months to design and build the centre, it could be argued the actual running of the centre is only a seven-year deal.
The contract winner was Traffic Information Services, a joint venture between Serco, the RAC and Halcrow. Now called Tis, this company is wholly owned by the Serco Group, with the RAC and Halcrow running certian services. Tis is a private-finance initiative project, which is part of the Government's public-private partnership policy. The contract is subject to the usual tough guidelines and targets, together with any payments from it.
Once it won the contract, Serco spent around £5m getting communications firm Marconi to install a broadband network based on synchronous digital hierarchy - a system developed from transferring information by laser and light emitting diodes and asynchronous transfer mode - using the Internet.
There are plans in place to expand this system in the future so that it can be integrated with a possible Europe-wide network, providing information for drivers across the Continent. However, this is a long way off, as similar systems on the Continent work differently.
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