Whitehall selects partner for ATM

26 July 2007

Department for Transport officials have chosen their first local authority partner in a programme designed to encourage councils to deploy motorway-style advanced traffic management (ATM) on city routes.

Announcing the move in London at last week’s Transport 07 Conference, DfT chief scientific officer, Professor Brian Collins, stressed that the approach would be persuasive, not mandatory. Speaking on the department’s current ITS priorities, he declined to identify the council, which was due to be named ‘in the next few weeks’. But, he said, it was a large English urban authority with ‘complex traffic problems’.

The partnership will use synthetic modelling, which Collins described as a low-cost way of testing potential transport solutions in the context of wider issues, such as land-use planning. Developed in fields such as cognitive science and biology, synthetic modelling can help in predicting complex network behaviour. Moving on the use for safety of intelligent speed adaptation (ISA), he emphasised the beneficial implications for urban areas. But a major obstacle was type approval of the software.

The aviation industry had already grappled with the problem and the DfT aimed to crib from its experience. Collins also highlighted two governance issues as needing urgent examination. One concerned the management of motorway slip roads, at the interface between Highways Agency and local administrations, to prevent uncontrolled surges. The other stemmed from the new ITS-derived capability to mash real-time and archived data from numerous different sources and ownerships.

This raised complex funding and analytical problems, with impacts for both policy-making and service delivery. Collins invited industry participation in developing a data-mashing incubator that the Government hoped would produce worthwhile results within weeks rather than months. He also announced a Future Infrastructure Forum which the DfT was setting up to identify long-term transport trends.

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