“This investment will help support decarbonisation but it places challenges on local authorities”

Highway authorities will be popular in their role of supporting the investment plans of energy and water companies over the next three to seven years. According to the UK Network Management Board (UKNMB), this will result in huge pressure on managing street works. 

The road sector is currently pivoting towards investing in network maintenance and supporting the reallocation of road space for different uses, especially active travel. When you combine this with the investment required to upgrade our utility infrastructure, the challenge becomes considerable. The water industry needs to upgrade an ageing infrastructure, as well as improve digital connectivity, install heat pumps and boost electricity capacity to support electric vehicle charging. According to Mark Kemp, chair of the UKNMB, there will be a “tsunami of activity”. 

Meanwhile, Ewan Wallace, chair of the Scottish Collaboration of Transportation Specialists (SCOTS) and head of environment and sustainability at Aberdeenshire Council, has highlighted how Aberdeenshire’s electricity network provider’s investment plans for battery cell technology and hydrogen will have a huge impact on the highway network. “This investment will help support decarbonisation but it places challenges on local authorities already under pressure,” he said.

The core of the issue

Managing this will require the right policy environment. Wallace said that the coring programme in Scotland has worked well. National Coring Programmes are carried out periodically throughout Scotland and involve taking cores of completed reinstatements in the public road. These cores are then checked to ensure compliance with current standards.  
With 32 local authorities allocated across nine regions in Scotland, Wallace said there is a manageable scale of operation. The success rate for reinstatements is now at 90%, with an aspiration to increase this percentage to improve reinstatement quality. Satbir Gill, network manager from Hounslow Highways, one of the five pathway PFIs for highways, said that coring had also been successful for the organisation.

Changing lanes

Another policy approach the UKNMB is keen to explore further is the lane rental scheme. A major component of this scheme is to get the right behaviours in place when streets works are undertaken. Lane rental schemes enable highway authorities to charge companies for the time that street and road works occupy their busiest routes. However, these schemes cover a very small amount of the network. 

Following successful pilots from Transport for London and Kent, just Surrey and West Sussex currently operate lane rental schemes, which cover less than 5% of London’s road network and between 5-7% elsewhere. Given this low level of use on what are the most difficult or busy roads, the question is whether this percentage could be increased. 

To understand the correct level of lane rental use is a difficult task, but when you look at the levels of future demand on the network for street works, it could be exactly the right question for authorities to be answering.