Policing the motorway - how tech makes the roads safer

Leaving for his holidays, John Bucknall drove off one sunny day with his caravan in tow. An hour or so later, after joining the motorway, he started to get a nagging sensation that something was wrong.

When he looked in the mirror he suddenly realised there was no caravan attached to the car.

Flustered, he pulled in to the service station and phoned the Highways Agency. Within minutes, the operators manning the Regional Traffic Control Centre in Surrey had located the caravan.

"It's alright, sir, we've found it," said the voice on the end of the phone. "You went over a bump just around the corner from your house and it came away from your car. The police found it an hour or so ago."

Actually, the driver's name was not John Bucknall but the story is true and typical of the type of work the Highways Agency has recently been charged with in aiding the police to manage traffic.

The £7.6m Regional Traffic Control Centre in Surrey is one of seven similar facilities aimed at assisting police in jobs, such as setting speed limits, assisting breakdowns and clearing debris after an accident. This leaves the police to concentrate on stopping people speeding and looking out for other criminal activity.

Take a look at photos of the centre here. Simon Duke, Highways Agency project manager, said: "It's about the Highways Agency taking on aspects of policing that are not particular to fighting crime, such as sweeping debris, setting signals and monitoring hotspots. In 1998 we were charged with being a more effective operation. Up until now we've failed at that."

The centre, which covers the M3, M23 and M25, and is set to include the whole of the southeast by the end of next year, is manned by operators who act as the 'eyes in the sky', farming out work and updates to the traffic officers in vehicles.

The call centre runs over an extensive IP network, which includes telephony, so calls can be routed through to mobile radios, police and other emergency services. When an operator receives a call, they can pinpoint the exact location of it on an interactive map. By clicking on that map, the operator can switch to CCTV and zoom in on the person calling for help.

They can then begin to manage the situation, calling extra assistance if necessary, changing the speed limits and publishing roadside warnings where appropriate.

Sarah, a Highways Agency operator who mans the control centre, explained to silicon.com: "If there was a lone female feeling vulnerable, we could radio through to the mobile unit giving the location so they could be with her. We are monitoring the units all the time. They are in radio contact for their safety too."

She adds: "It'll free up police time an awful lot. The amount of jobs we get done now shows how many the police have been doing, for example, clearing a plastic bag - things like that just take a few minutes to clear up."

Once a call goes out to the mobile unit, traffic officers driving what has been designed to look almost identical to a police car, are sent out to assist.

Nicky, one of the many traffic officers at the Highways Agency, said: "The unbelievable will happen. It could be a member of the public and they'll suddenly come to a halt and ask for directions. It's amazing what people will do. It's reassuring that if we breakdown [the operators] can see things we can't. People say 'oh, it's big brother watching' but this is to assist people and help in any way."

In August this year, the Highways Agency was challenged with a massive incident when a man using his mobile phone on the M25 crashed into a lorry, causing a tailback of 8,000 cars.

Dominic, Nicky's manager, said: "Just by picking up that mobile phone causes 8,000 people to queue. That's pretty selfish. Once you stop on the hard shoulder there is a strike time of an average of 11 minutes."

The seven control centres throughout the UK are part of a larger £490m project to improve the Highways Agency's IT network.

The National Roads Telecommunications Services project is designed to link more than 14,000 traffic message boards, emergency telephones, CCTV cameras and traffic monitoring systems to the Highways Agency's network of traffic control centres - just like the one in Surrey.