Highways England aims to more closely follow the aviation sector when looking to improve safety, project delivery and customer service, the company’s chief executive Jim O’Sullivan told the CIHT National Conference this morning.

 

Mr O’Sullivan, a former managing director of Heathrow Airport, was in discussion with CIHT chief executive Sue Percy in a breakfast interview which started the conference proceedings.

 

He said that Highways England is working on several fronts to ensure that strategic roads operate more like airlines and airports. The first is safety: “You are more likely to be injured working on roads than in most other sectors and that is just not acceptable. I think airports and airlines look after passenger safety arguably better than we do.”

 

He added that England’s strategic road network is the second safest in Europe after Sweden, “but I want it to be the safest and we have targets that drive us in that direction”. The aviation sector’s approach to safety on works sites is more “sophisticated” than in highways, he went on, adding that he would like to get to a position when anyone on a site – including a banksman or young graduate engineer – who feels that safety is not being followed as closely as it should can feel confident in calling a stop to a job.

 

A second area where Highways England can learn from aviation is in how a portfolio of future work is managed, he added. “Highways England is good at delivering (individual) projects but airports better manage their (overall) capital portfolios to achieve the right outcomes. We need to do more of that here.”

 

And in terms of customer service Mr O’Sullivan predicted: “We will get to a place where the strategic road network is a lot like air traffic control and we can manage traffic flows.” He looked ahead to a time when a driver will be able to use a mobile device to see what the traffic conditions are likely to be on a route the next day, forecast weather conditions and predict the best route to drive.  

 

He went on to say that Highways England is working to better understand what its customers want from the strategic road network. “People might want to drive down a motorway at 70MPH until they get to an obstruction and sit and wait for it to clear. Or they might want to be slowed to 50MPH beforehand to save on fuel.

 

“I don’t yet know which scenario people want; we are in the foothills of understanding what customers want.”

 

Transportation Professional’s April issue will include a full report from CIHT’s National Conference, which was sponsored by Atkins.

 

(Photo: Highways England)