Siemens has won a traffic signal contract with North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC), England's largest county.
The announcement follows the introduction of the company’s Stratos system to the region - a cloud-based solution for all traffic management, control and monitoring requirements.
Allan McVeigh, network strategy manager for NYCC, said: ‘Using Stratos, Siemens will provide network management during normal office hours and network monitoring and fault management on a 24-hour basis, seven days a week.’
The contract covers network management and monitoring for the county council, which is responsible for 337 installations including 103 junctions, 205 pedestrian crossings and 29 variable message signs (VMS).
North Yorkshire also maintains an Urban Traffic Control system in Harrogate, covering 57 sites, and in Scarborough for 27 sites - additional monitoring is undertaken by a combined Siemens Remote Monitoring System (RMS) that monitors a further 188 sites.
Siemens said that all these sites, and the VMS signs, are now on Stratos. It also plans to migrate all RMS signs across too, allowing the majority of the strategic traffic signal sites and VMS to be monitored from one system.
Martin Andrews, head of operational services at the company said: ‘Linking existing local systems delivering traffic control, sign and car-park management in both Harrogate and Scarborough, Stratos provides scalable real-time traffic management, information and control, ranging from basic monitoring to strategic control in a new ITS hosted solution, meaning there is no need for dedicated servers or client machines, which in turn means no capital cost, depreciation of assets or ongoing hardware maintenance costs.
‘Combined with our new service offering, NYCC will benefit from a consistent level of support to manage and monitor the traffic signals network and systems’.
The news comes as NYCC revealed plans to write to the Government to accept an offer of a four-year funding deal instead of an annual financial settlement.
The Government has given councils an October deadline to develop efficiency plans to qualify for a four-year budget to aid financial planning through to 2020.
Noting the ‘national and global economic environment created by Brexit’, NYCC said the four-year deal offers ‘a degree of certainty and the opportunity for contingency planning during a period of extreme uncertainty’, adding that it would ‘maintain sensible levels of reserves as a buffer against unforeseen events’.
North Yorkshire has delivered £116m savings, has firm plans for a further £36.3m and has begun to consider ways to bridge the remaining funding gap of £14m through to 2019/20.
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