Andrew Fennell, Managing Director — Roads, at 1Spatial recently exhibited at Highways UK 2022. Here are his reflections on the event:
We approached Highways UK with a mixture of excitement and nervousness as this was the launch event for our highly anticipated 1Streetworks traffic management planning solution.
We ran our systems live, no rolling videos or paper pamphlets here, just a live connection to our SaaS solution on two giant 55-inch tablets. We created a traffic management plan, for anywhere on a UK road that an attendee asked for, in under two minutes.
The show opened earlier than in previous years at 8 am which caught attendees out a little so the first hour was quiet for us and the other stands.
And then it hit like a tsunami! The second event post-lockdown and the busiest I’ve ever attended, with over 8,000 visitors, and it felt like they all came to our stand on day 1. We had queues… I’ve never had that before, and on both days, I thought only the restaurants had queues at the NEC!
Our strap line was punchy “The most disruptive traffic management planning solution to enter the highways market in the last 30 years”.
We were rightly challenged on that but following a quick demo that lasted a couple of minutes and inevitably started a much longer conversation, everybody (and I’m not exaggerating), nodded their heads and agreed, we actually had.
We left the event physically exhausted but elated that our hard work (and it was the team that achieved this not me) had been met with surprise, applause, and a largely unanimous opinion by the industry that we had indeed delivered a revolution in traffic management planning.
