Urban traffic management and control, UK

Under the Traffic Management Act, Highways England is required – as part of its network management duties – to enable the efficient movement of traffic. One way Highways England is meeting this is via the urban traffic management and control (UTMC) project. Using Osprey, Mott MacDonald’s in-house developed UTMC system, we are helping Highways England to improve efficiency and safety on local and strategic road networks across the south-east and Yorkshire/north-east regions of England.

Opportunity

There is currently no automatic ‘dialogue’ between strategic road network managers and local highway authority managers in the event of an incident. If Highways England needs to divert traffic away from a motorway accident, it can use its signal network to coax drivers off at the closest junction. But this will increase the traffic load on local roads, where it then becomes an issue for the local authorities.

Highways England’s collaborative traffic management programme, supported by the Innovation Designated Fund, is using the UTMC project to address this issue by working with local government to provide a seamless information and control interface with highways authorities. Key to this is the efficient and effective sharing of data using UTMC technology.

Solution

The project is being delivered using our Osprey solution. This enabled us to integrate existing systems into a new, coordinated UTMC system which provides a common approach to traffic management. Our solution architecture provides cost-effective, low-risk scaling, which allows our Osprey solution to comply with Highways England’s national traffic management needs. The new UTMC system display can be customised using information from diverse sources – such as CCTV, VMS and traffic signal equipment – to create junction dashboards. We are actively working with Highways England’s CHARM team to implement an interface that will aid development of the next generation advanced traffic management system.

Outcome

Our Osprey UTMC system is providing improved data exchange between Highways England and local highway authorities. This allows coordinated traffic management interventions to be applied using triggers such as increasing journey times or traffic incident detection. These interventions can range from sending alerts to a maintenance crew to full implementation of an emergency traffic-management response, with the overall goal of helping improve traffic flow around incidents and congestion blackspots.

The customisable dashboards allow traffic managers to configure the way they manage junctions, ensuring they have access to the most useful information so they can quickly identify hazards and implement actions. Our system uses cloud-hosted servers, providing increased resilience and allowing support and maintenance to be carried out remotely by our staff via secure access. Our work developing Osprey UTMC systems has expanded from an initial phase in south-east England to implementing traffic management across Yorkshire and the north-east, potentially leading to coverage across the whole Highways England network in the future.