National Highways progresses Digital Roads strategy

National Highways has also been announced as the only UK winner of an Esri Special Achievement in GIS Award. The award was made at the Esri annual User Conference in California, one of the world’s largest geospatial industry events, attracting almost 40,000 attendees. 

Special Achievement in GIS Awards recognise organisations which are demonstrating geospatial leadership in their field and setting new precedents for the global GIS community. More than 100,000 entries were submitted worldwide.

“This award is a significant achievement for our team,” said National Highways chief data officer, Davin Crowley-Sweet. “Our spatial data is the ‘crown jewels’ of our data landscape – the primary key of primary keys. Having a single view of it to support the whole organisation helps foster a data-driven culture, increasing business benefits and critical for delivering our Digital Roads vision and beyond.

“We are always looking for new ways to make people’s journeys smoother and safer on our roads and we are now able to react more swiftly to incidents to get traffic moving again as quickly as possible.

“Meanwhile, our vision for the digital roads of the future will incorporate new capabilities, such as digital twins, predictive planning, single view of assets, and connected autonomous vehicles. Each of these initiatives will require a common, trusted representation of the network to be successful.”

“Our spatial data is the ‘crown jewels’ of our data landscape. Having a single view of it to support the whole organisation helps foster a data-driven culture”

National Highways made the move to an Esri enterprise GIS over a year ago, following recognition that geospatial data was its most critical type of data – the result of an in-depth asset evaluation which valued its data overall at £60bn. Delivered via Esri UK’s Managed Cloud Service, the GIS consolidates all location data into one central system and provides a wide range of applications, data models and other GIS services, enabling 5,660 staff to make better use of spatial data.

“National Highways is at the forefront of demonstrating what a true enterprise GIS can achieve,” said Chris Barber, head of transport at Esri UK. “Esri technology is helping to maximise the value gained from geospatial data which is now used more extensively across the organisation. Taking an enterprise approach gives National Highways a solid, scalable foundation to help meet its Digital Roads objectives and tackle some of the most pressing challenges facing our roads today and in years to come.”

National Highways has set out its Digital Road 2025 vision detailing how the growth of digital technology and the move to electric, connected and autonomous vehicles will fundamentally change how roads are designed, built, operated and used by drivers.