National Highways NEAR Schemes

Key information

Scope of project: National Highways NEAR Schemes

Area: Nationwide

Services: Traffic monitoring, Stopped Vehicle Detection,

Background

The highways environment is high risk and those companies with personnel operating within it recognise that solutions to protect their workforce and their on-site assets are critical both for their teams’ personal safety and for their business operations.

In addition, solutions to issues such as stopped vehicles on the motorway network, which create a potentially fatal hazard for the occupants and other members of the traveling public, and the provision of traffic information, are invaluable.

Contractors working on the NEAR schemes needed a mobile, temporary and sustainable solution for monitoring accidents, incidents and breakdowns.

Solution

The Clearway Highway Technology Tower can provide video-based stopped vehicle detection, ANPR, traffic monitoring, vehicle count and classification, PPE monitoring and compliance, littering/fly tipping detection and air quality monitoring. This provides a solution to protecting roadworkers, on-site assets and road users, whilst also providing data, especially in traditionally technology barren/dark areas of the network. In many cases there is no provision for mains power or a telephone line, so the tower’s sustainable technology using renewable energy sources (solar, wind and battery) is the perfect solution.

The tower requires no cabling in the verges, no vegetation clearance and minimal traffic management which also solves the problem of small installation windows – road operators such as National Highways want to minimise disruption to road users and the risk congestion brings to the motorway network. Our solution is also used to secure compounds and monitor activity in traffic management areas.

The dangers of having operatives on live carriageways are significantly reduced, a key benefit and driver behind the nationwide roll-out of our solution. The towers are also supported by our 24/7/365 NSI Gold Cat II Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC) and/or monitored by a client’s monitoring station.

Outcome

The Clearway inView Highway Technology Tower has been deployed across a number of National Highways’ NEAR (National Emergency Area Retrofit) Schemes over the past 2 years to support the safety of our roadworkers and road users.

The use of the towers provided the following benefits:

Enhanced and improved customer service through temporary works
Reduced roadworker exposure to risk through a rapidly deployable solution
Reduction in maintenance visits as the camera technology can also be used by onsite traffic management staff to monitor and remotely view the site using a mobile application
A cableless solution as they use solar/wind power
Cost savings – as the towers are fully mobile and rapidly deployable, for a project comprising over 50 towers at 500m intervals, for example, it saves many weeks of preparatory work on site that a temporary fixed solution requires. The financial savings using our approach are in the £m’s on a project of this size.
Installing the Clearway inView Highway Technology Towers has saved time and money on a number of NEAR schemes (M62, M1, M3, M25, M5, M4, M2…) and reduced risk and disruption.