Satnav revolution to help you avoid roadworks for ever
SO you’re heading off on holiday and you’re stuck in a traffic jam on the M1 with no end in sight.
If only there was a really smart app that could have told you how to have avoided this all-too-familiar motorway nightmare.
Well, soon there will be. A £10million website is being developed which will automatically tell satnavs where roadworks are taking place to help drivers avoid congestion.
Street Manager will harvest data from water, electricity and gas companies, and local councils. It will also make it easier to know which roads will have temporary traffic lights.
The site, expected to be up and running by next April, will contain details in advance of planned works. Transrecord, port officials said putting all the data in one place would help apps such as Waze and Google Maps provide up-todate information.
Last night, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said: ‘ Everyone has experienced the annoyance of travel that is disrupted by roadworks, but the systems we currently use to help companies communicate this aren’t fit for purpose and need changing.’
Utility companies may also be forced to dig up the pavement instead of the road to reduce impact on traffic.
There are around 2.5million roadworks under way in England each year. Current sources of information about works are often incomplete or out of date, critics say.
The Department of Transport Street Manager initiative can’t come soon enough. Families rushing off for the school holidays today face gridlock on roads, chaos at the busiest airports on and tortuous rail journeys. From today, large sections of Britain’s biggest intercity line will be out of action for 16 days.
And a key section south of Warrington on the West Coast main line, which connects London with Glasgow and Edinburgh, will shut until August 4 while engineering works take place.
Passengers will have to endure diverted routes, change to different trains or take bus replacements. Those affected include travellers heading north on staycations in the Lake District, Glasgow and Blackpool.
Northbound services between London Euston and Glasgow via Birmingham will terminate at Crewe, while those travelling south will terminate at Preston.
Passengers travelling to or from Birmingham have been advised to take a rail replacement bus service between Preston and Crewe. The RAC warned of delays between 15 minutes to an hour over the weekend on major routes such as the M6 and M1 northbound.
Meanwhile, air-traffic controllers are preparing for the busiest summer on record. They have already seen the busiest day on record with 8,863 flights handled on July 5.
Today, controllers expect 8,800 flights in and out of UK airports,
As well as longer queues at airports, flights are more likely to be delayed in the peak summer months when airspace is more crowded.
Holidaymakers using Heathrow will be hoping to avoid a repeat of Thursday’s mayhem, when thousands of BA passengers endured delays of up to two hours after the baggage system broke down.
‘Current data not fit for purpose’