Highways Agency Traffic Cameras Service

Date: 4/2/2010

Source: WSP on behalf of the Highways Agency

The Highways Agency (HA) is responsible for the construction, maintenance and operation of England’s strategic road network. This network comprises 7,754km of motorway and major trunk roads, carrying a third of the country’s road traffic and two thirds of all heavy freight traffic, which in places can lead to heavy congestion.

The HA continually looks at ways to improve the way its strategic objectives (Safe roads, Reliable journeys, Informed travellers) are met, often utilising innovative technical solutions to achieve its operational goals. Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) is widely used throughout the network and is seen as a beneficial tool and key to the continued improvement of monitoring and managing the network on a day-to-day basis.

The Traffic Cameras Service (TCS) provides key stakeholders and the public with access to CCTV camera images. The service is the largest of its kind in the world comprising of more than 1400 cameras and has been developed using a number of innovative approaches including design, delivery and partnering to achieve its objectives.

TCS plays a key role in providing customer focused traffic information services and its primary objective is to improve journey time reliability on England’s strategic road network by providing up-to-the-minute images of traffic conditions via either the ‘still images’ or the ‘media streaming’ service. Each service focuses on different target user groups and is tailored to meet their specific requirements.

Still images are available to both operational users via a restricted website, the Highways Agency Network Viewer (HANET), as well as the general public via the Agency’s own Traffic England website.

An innovative partnering approach with media organisations and web hosts has been fostered and implemented, allowing nominated third parties or ‘media partners’ to access and disseminate still and live images to the public through their own traffic news bulletins and websites. For example, still images are now available on the BBC’s dedicated travel pages and streaming images have been made available to broadcasters such as the BBC News and Channel M for edited use in televised travel bulletins. This greatly assists the HA in reaching a far wider audience and supports the growth and public confidence in the Traffic Information industry.

Sharing of HA CCTV images with media partners was made possible by the introduction of the Video Information Highway (VIH) which defines the policy and methods for dissemination of images to third parties in a safe and secure way so that images of a potentially distressing nature are not broadcast to the public.  It is this combining of innovative technology, VIH policy and the HA’s willingness to share its images that has made the TCS so successful.

The TCS has generated positive feedback from users and plays a key role in the HA’s goal to provide road users with improved information. The service has allowed for improvements in maintaining the network and journey planning and consequently has facilitated the process of easing congestion.

For further information about the Traffic Cameras Service, please contact David Weston on 0121 352 4753 or via email: david.weston@wspgroup.com

Key words: Communications, Incident, Monitoring, Traffic information