1 Year on…
Andy Fennell, Managing Director of 1Streetworks, delivered a presentation at the HAUC(UK) Convention, which encompassed two primary groups: Highways Authorities and Utilities, along with their supporting supply chain. During his presentation, Andy showcased several instances of the work undertaken by 1Streetworks and elucidated on the tangible benefits it has brought to these groups.
Andy discusses the scope of projects undertaken by 1Streetworks in collaboration with our partner UK Power Networks, extending gratitude to Surrey and Kent County Council for their cooperation.
Watch the video of the full presentation to find out more!
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Transcript
“Thank you very much. I’m conscious I’m between you and lunch. It smells lovely, by the way. Right. Okay, here we go. So first things first. There’s a QR code on the screen. It links you to our LinkedIn site, and you can win a Lego, Ghostbusters Ecto-1 car from there. So if you’d like to, if you’d like to click on that and add that, that would be great.
So I’ve got five minutes and I will keep to time. You might remember last year I was here, so we demonstrated live a system called 1, yes its working good, a system live called 1Streetworks, it put out a four way set of lights. So essentially, the system automatically creates Red book compliant traffic management plans in a couple of minutes.
For those that weren’t here last year, by the way, it automatically creates a traffic management plan in a couple of minutes. A couple of thank yous, so we’ve been on the ground now for the best part of a year with a number of organisations, but special thanks to Surrey County Council and Kent County Council, so Matt Jezzard, Allison Hughes, I know you’re both here, thank you. And also UK Power Networks who we’ve been partnered with and done some great work. I know Richard Boisier’s here, so thank you Richard.
So the system creates what you can see behind me in a couple of minutes, and I’m going to take you through really quickly a couple of use cases on, what we’ve seen on the ground and what I’m going to try and do is demonstrate how that benefits the highways authorities and the utility companies. So this is a street in Gillingham, Kent and if you use a traditional method for traffic management planning using AutoCAD and traffic management companies, this is a road closure every day of the week. So that’s a 12 week lead time for TTRO. That’s a bus route diversion in this case, that’s congestion, that’s a detrimental air quality while the traffic is queuing around the block and so forth and so on.
So what we did is this. We met with the Highways Authority on the ground. Sorry the picture’s not great, it’s been raining for the last eight months, you might have noticed. We met the Highways Authority and the customer on the ground. We went through maybe 5 or 6 traffic management plans on the fly using the system. The customer, it turned out, had quite a large car park. So we put the vans there instead. And this went from a road closure and all the challenges associated with that, to a two way set of traffic lights. You can actually see the bus going through in the background, so we didn’t have to suspend the bus route either. Improving air quality, reducing congestion, significantly reducing the cost and the disruption and the time taken in order to do the job.
So that’s one example of how 1Streetworks operates and how we can benefit both the public, but also the undertakers and the authorities that permit them. Next up, this is a link box for those that don’t work as an electricity distribution network operator. But there are thousands of these and indeed for all of the utility company, there are thousands of fixed assets, whether it’s a water metre, a link box, a gas joint, all of those things, we know where they are, broadly speaking.
So what we’re able to do within 1Streetworks is load somewhere in the region of 10,000 or so of these and run all of the traffic management plans for that in about two hours. And that means for the traffic management plans that are simple. So give and take, two way lights, that sort of stuff. We can just kind of rubberstamp those and they can go into the pipeline and we’ll deliver those at a point in the future. But for the ones that are really complicated, the ones that are more difficult, that create road closures, it gives us the opportunity months in advance to look at those and see if there are novel ways we can deliver that works, that means we don’t have to close roads, we don’t have to create congestion, and we don’t have to disrupt the public and other people on the ground. So we completed that work and that work is now ongoing.
So just to really summarise it quite quickly, what I think is in it for the authority areas and what I think is in it for the utility companies. If you work inside 1Streetworks, the site plans are specific and they’re consistent. So the output that you see on the screen is the same for every single traffic management plan. Very clear, very easy to make decisions on. If it needs editing, changing, updating, that takes five minutes on a team’s call, not an email trail between you and the CAD technician for the next three weeks in order to get that changed. And we reduce the road closures and by definition, we also then improve the road, the quality of the air for the people, living around those road closures or what would have been road closures.
And lastly, for the infrastructure owners and again, we’ve got good data on this, so we can talk about this in more detail if you want to come to stand 19 which is where we are, we can drive the achievement of the regulator’s key performance indicators using the 1Streetworks system. And we’ve done that really well in collaboration with, UK Power Networks. And in fact they, if you look at LinkedIn, they put a great piece out earlier in the year on that. It improves customer service, it means you can get to ground with your customers and talk about what that traffic management is going to look like.
And ultimately it allows us to enable collaboration. So we can take point data so data of asset locations from multiple organisations let’s say it’s UK Power Networks, Cadent Gas, Scottish and Southern Energy, and we can load all of that data in, run all the traffic management plans across all of those assets and look at places where collaboration is possible, where rather than digging the road up three times, we can dig it up once and share that road space. And that’s all possible because 1Streetworks is a digital collaboration platform that generates a traffic management plan in a couple of minutes.
So that’s me done, that’s you on your way to lunch. That’s a QR code. Feel free to scan it. Lunch is lovely, by the way. It smells fantastic. So enjoy. Thank you.“
