Steve White, head of public sector at Causeway Technologies, looks at how local authorities can prepare for the sudden windfall of an additional £8.3bn funding package over 11 years.
Transport secretary Mark Harper called it 'the biggest ever funding uplift for local road improvements'. The question is, are local authorities ready to make the most of it?
Given the road maintenance funding shortfall local authorities have faced for the last decade, this sudden investment is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to deliver real change for road users.
It’s vital that local authorities seek optimal paths to delivery. According to the latest figures from the Asphalt Industry Alliance, the current road maintenance backlog in England and Wales equates to £14bn.
Moreover, nearly one in five local roads in England and Wales are in such poor condition that they have fewer than five years of life remaining.
Don't underestimate digital solutions
When Causeway conducted research with the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT) about digital transformation in roads maintenance, it became clear that progress in adopting new technologies was limited to date.
From Causeway’s experience, a dramatic underestimation of the capabilities of the latest solutions compared to traditional asset management methodologies and legacy systems plays a role within local authorities.
What is now on the table for asset managers goes far beyond improving current schemes and addressing day-to-day issues. Gone are the days of standing around a map, plotting out assets and work plans.
The latest systems bring together a multitude of information regarding assets and operations to gain invaluable insights and deliver optimized maintenance strategies with ease, addressing short and long-term objectives and the needs of road users.
For example, Causeway’s asset management team recently worked with Brent Council to clear their pothole backlog. We partnered with Vaisala who carried out a video survey, identifying the potholes using their Road AI system. This took less than a week.
The survey data was analysed in Causeway Horizons, which generated prioritised work plans for the contractor two weeks after the project began. Using jet patching technology, within three months they had filled in around 5,000 potholes.
Once asset information is analysed in Causeway Horizons, it can generate multi-year schemes for road asset management almost instantly. These schemes can be sent to an operational asset management system that can turn them into work plans pushed out to field teams via mobile applications. All this can be done with minimal human input and automatically adapted in real-time to changing circumstances.
Adapting to local priorities
Beyond day-to-day operation, this system has huge benefits for local authority budget holders looking to demonstrate spending plans to council leaders. They can easily create multiple long-term plans and easy-to-understand visualisations to demonstrate what would be achieved with different budgets and priorities.
For instance, if a council wants to focus on improving road assets around a town centre, it's possible to show what progress would look like in 10 years compared to a scheme focused on residential areas – demonstrating exactly what the council would get for their money.
Once agreed upon, a scheme can be translated straight into an operational project and systems like Causeway’s Alloy can feed back to improve scheme modelling, generating even more value for local authorities and creating an automated feedback loop of continuous improvement.
The resources saved by doing this are huge. In one example, Causeway was able to secure Fife Council a remarkable 80% saving in time, as printed work requests, lengthy handovers, and manual input into systems no longer constrained repair crews.
Between August 2020 and December 2022, Fife Council completed 24,178 carriageway patching jobs - a notable improvement on previous rates and a big step towards reducing longstanding backlogs.
Moving beyond single asset management
Increasingly, the latest digital solutions also allow the full integration of different types of assets. This allows organisations to track multiple asset types and service areas in the same system, allowing for easy comparison of performance and behaviour across services.
This means plans can combine road maintenance, streetlights, trees, footpaths, cycleways and more. Much of this work can be automated in real time and updated to consider work that might be taking place across the different asset types. This eliminates crossover works and avoids localized disruption caused by concurrent or conflicting works.
The widening digital gap
Local authorities that are not engaging with the latest planning solutions are missing opportunities presented by new funding. Antiquated planning methods for road repairs have been holding some road maintenance teams back for years while those that have invested in digitalisation are already pulling ahead – the new funding will widen this gap.
Local authorities need to assess their processes today and ask whether they have the solutions in place to bring real value to motorists when the new funding is allocated.
