Highways England held a workshop in Birmingham with its wider supply chain community to identify opportunities to improve customer experience at or through roadworks. The UK Network is already saturated with congestion and faces many challenges before a cone is placed on the carriageway. The population growth is only going to make the situation deteriorate in the coming years. The solutions will need to be more radical than managing congestion at roadworks. However, roadworks do cause much frustration for the road user and the perception that insufficient work is taking place behind the cones is a common observation.

Highways England customers do not like:

1. Poor communication

2. No work taking place

3. Poor diversion signing

Highways England are looking to focus on:

1. Harnessing Communication – providing real time information via websites, social media, tweeting and other media outlets.

2. Dynamic Roadworks – provide more flexible traffic speed limits through roadworks while maintaining the safety of both the road user and the road worker.

3. Incident Response – resolving accidents more quickly, improving communication and debriefs to take on lessons learnt with accident planning scenarios.

4. Better Behaviour – develop technology to discourage tail gating and improve fuel management by motorists.

5. Diversion Routes – adopt a minimum and improve desirable criteria for diversion routes ensuring routes are suitable for freight with ratings 1-3.

6. Show Cases – drive customer service on complex projects with best practice for TM, recovery, incident planning, communication and flexibility.

7. Cultural Change – roll-out workshops to improve internal culture and provide positive customer experience.

8. Assurance Framework – measure what you treasure, diversion routes, quality, productivity, inconvenience, satisfaction and information.

However, one of the most interesting parts of the day, and in my opinion one of the most beneficial and certainly most productive was:

“User Centred Thinking” – a human factors approach to roadworks:

· We have limited mental resource

· We save these through short cuts

· Attention is fallible

· We cannot handle too much information at once

· Perception is subjective and we are subject to perceptual traps

· Stress / anxiety dramatically increases error rates

We need to design error out at concept:

· Driver attention

· Remove clutter

· Road markings

· Sign placement

· Junctions, roundabouts, slip roads, route options, change in lane use

How well do we consider human factors:

· The design

· How we build

· How we maintain

· How we operate

We do not address these issues seriously even though they have been around for at least 20 years – there is nothing new!!! As an industry we have not moved forward, we lack the courage to make the big decisions we need to make to manage our traffic flow challenges with a growing population. We need to look at congestion on our Network now and make radical decisions for the future and not a sticking plaster answer to a much bigger challenge. We have to address roadworks, but we must address day-to-day congestion now.