Off the beaten track
Truvelo UK is helping site owners and tenants to improve road safety on non-public roads. The aim is to encourage a uniform standard of responsible driving at all times and everywhere
Automated traffic enforcement and compliance is now commonplace on public roads. Road users in many countries around the world have become accustomed to the use of both fixed and mobile enforcement camera solutions to address all kinds of offences, as well as the presence of Speed Information Displays (SIDs) and other devices intended to bring a less punitive pressure to bear in terms of driving safely. Where implementation of such solutions has been well-considered their fairness is understood and acknowledged, and media and pressure groups’ accusations of revenue-raising have been successfully addressed.
Extending the use of enforcement and compliance regimes and technology onto non-public roads and estates is a logical next step.
This has several positive outcomes. It gives drivers a more uniform level of expectation in terms of the levels of responsibility required of them, and enables locations’ owners and operators — whether public or private-sector — to meet their legal obligations and organisational goals/KPIs in terms of both safety and incident reduction.
In the UK, many larger private-sector organisations now operate traffic safety regimes on their properties. These regimes help to monitor and govern the driving habits of employees, contractors and other site visitors. Non-commercial road users will also be familiar with the traffic-calming measures which are present on local authority-run sites to which the public has access. An example is the ‘Number of days since a serious incident stopped work’-type initiatives at municipal tips and recycling centres; these are often accompanied by traffic-calming measures such as sleeping policemen, kerbs, bollards and lane geometries designed to limit vehicles’ speeds and/or proximity to pedestrians.
More modern industrial estates, business and science parks feature traffic-calming measures as a matter of course. Typically, these feature civil engineering-type solutions — again, kerbs and bollards, highly visible delineation of lanes and parking, sleeping policemen and so on. Where a location is owned or resided in by a single, larger organisation, that entity will often have implemented technological solutions in line with their own corporate governance policies. These solutions will include such as cameras for speed control, vision-based access-control systems which feature automatic number plate recognition, SIDs and so on.
Owners and landlords of larger sites may also provide similar solutions on behalf of multiple clients on the same site. This may be done as part of a safety-monitoring incentive/guarantee package intended to attract tenants, to provide collective peace of mind or give an impression of ‘cachet’.
However, there remains a significant number of locations of a certain vintage which have no measures in place at all. This is typically because they were built at a time when traffic safety was afforded less priority. Since then, such sites have been considered too small or of insufficient yield to merit upgrades, or else tenants may simply not have perceived of a need to seek upgrades.
Whether these locations may be considered safety risks is perhaps a point for debate but the fact is that the cost point of implementing improved traffic safety need not be onerous — especially when the potential accrued benefits are considered.
Broadening the offer
A unique feature of Truvelo’s offer is the ability to undertake civil engineering tasks of all types relating to systems instalment and traffic safety-calming.
Unlike many of its competitors, which sub-contract civils work, Truvelo retains the capability in-house. This results in a far greater level of flexibility in terms of design effort where a safety scheme is concerned — the company can cooperate directly with clients to design more cohesive solutions. As a natural progression of installation work for cameras and SIDs, Truvelo staff — fully qualified to work in a roadside environment and implement traffic management — can also apply road markings for lanes and parking, lift and drop kerbs, install sleeping policemen and so on.
In the near future, this cooperative work will be evolved into a fuller consultancy facility, with Truvelo providing advice and a design lead. A further extension will the provision of enforcement as a service. On-site camera technology can be linked to Truvelo-managed back office systems.
On public roads, those who are unsafe run the risk of licence endorsements or revocation. This option is not open to private companies, however they can choose to exclude from their facilities individuals and companies which commit serious and/or persistent offences. Often, the latter is done on a points basis, and Truvelo can offer the data-management capabilities to facilitate this.
Not all of this is punitive, however; managed services can be used to improve the customer service of even the smallest companies. This includes access control — recognising when a client is arriving and controlling barriers, allocating parking, alerting company employees to their visitors’ arrivals and so on.
These digitised services are Cloud-based and entirely secure. And, although the emphasis is on improving safety and — ultimately — saving lives and preventing injury, the net effect is an uplift in customer service.