Cardiff County Council

Best Practice for Highways

The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) recently issued a report for the Transport Infrastructure Assets Code. It is a guide to support asset management, financial management and reporting and highlights best practice for highway and transport officials.

20 years ago, asset management was still a new idea for highways departments, and like most new ideas, took up a lot of time and money. Councils would spend months conducting a walked asset inventory but not have the time and resources to do anything with the data.

Councillor Delme Bowen, Executive Member for Traffic and Transportation at Cardiff Council recognises this scenario. He explains: “Our last asset inventory was captured three years ago. It’s often the case that one person is in charge of managing the surveys and analysing the data, but that’s a lot for one person to do! It’s no good collecting all this information if it’s not stored in a usable condition and easily accessible. Otherwise all the time and effort gone into gathering the data is wasted.”

The importance of asset inventory
Knowing the value of assets in the network is likely to become mandatory in future for councils to gain access to sufficient budgets for the year. Having an accurate record of what is in your network can provide a number of benefits: especially if they are stored in a usable way. Budget planning is potentially a big money saving area for councils.

Cllr Bowen holds the portfolio for the upkeep of Cardiff’s 1100KM of road network and clarifies the situation clearly: “Budgets have historically been based on the previous year, which isn’t necessarily a great way to manage future costs.”

Historical budgeting can result in some areas of a network getting a lot more money than it needs, while other areas might struggle to keep up with basic maintenance. Road side assets are even more difficult to allocate budget to, because you never know when something might need replacing due to a traffic accident or vandalism.

Simon Philips, operations manager at Yotta DCL explains: “If you have an up-to-date account of what assets you have in your network, things suddenly become a lot easier. If someone contests a parking ticket, citing the legalities of the line, you can check your Traffic Road Order matches site conditions, without leaving your desk. Or if a quote is needed for cleaning signs, renewing road markings or grass cutting, the inventory should tell you exactly what you have and what distance will need to be travelled to carry out the work. It means you can give third parties accurate information, saving time, money and resources.”

Technology leading the way
Looking forward, Cllr Bowen wants to see a move towards technology based solutions for asset management. Cardiff Council is currently using Yotta DCL’s Asset Inventory Video survey and Nano software.

Yotta’s video survey captures high resolution street level images with its bespoke inventory capture vehicles. The vans are equipped with high grade inertia tracking and differential GPS software, covering approximately 75km of road network per day.

Cllr Bowen comments: “It’s a big road network so having the video will be very helpful. It gives us the ability to allocate money more wisely, which is brilliant. It produces such a large amount of data, we’ve had to ask IT for a standalone server just for our asset inventory!”

Cardiff City Council view all file data from video surveys through the Nano software directly on their desktops.

Cllr Bowen said: “Support is a big issue when you’re using a service like this, but the team at Yotta have been brilliant: I’m very happy with the service we receive.

“Being able to view the city without an onsite visit has many benefits. With video, we can quickly see the footage of an area – staff can check things at their desktop rather than having to travel to locations.”

Philips comments: “For councils, savings can potentially be huge. Fewer trips to investigate calls means less money spent on petrol, increased productivity in the office and even seeing a reduction in carbon foot-print.”

“Nothing will ever replace the accurate, professional job done by people working in the field. However, if we can make things like budget allocation easier and be able to extract more information from video surveys by utilising these new technologies, then we shouldn’t be afraid to do that,” concluded Cllr Bowen.