Walsall Council nets top award for life saving road software

Date Published : 13 November 2008

Walsall Council has come out on top at a national local government and emergency services conference, hosted by the Ordnance Survey agency.

Saving lives and reducing injuries on our roads is a top priority for the authority which led the council to develop an innovative way of using a database mapping software called Geographical Information System (GIS) in its road safety management programme.

This system, employed by many local authorities in the United Kingdom, enables various departments within Walsall Council to capture, analyse and manage data and then link this data to specific locations in the borough.

The organisation’s highways department had been thinking of a way of measuring its road skidding resistance data against the number of injuries and fatalities on its principal roads in the borough.

For years, council engineers within the authority’s highways department had spent hundreds of man-hours recording accidents from police reports onto paper plans to determine which areas of its road network required attention from its anti-skid management programme.

Instead, together with local agency Marsh Associates, the council developed a way of using the GIS software programme to measure skidding resistance on its principal roads in the borough and link this data to traffic incident results.

This enabled the authority to pinpoint where road traffic incidents were taking place and effectively calculate which roads required further attention from its anti-skid management programme.

As a result of this innovative use of the software, its partnership with a local agency and collaboration with other local authorities in the West Midlands the authority claimed top prize in the GI User of the Year award.

Richard Pohribnyj, highway asset manager for Walsall Council expressed his delight at winning the national award: “Walsall is both proud and thrilled to have won the 2008 Ordnance Survey Award for Innovation. Collaborative working between the seven West Midlands authorities and our private sector partners has been key to our success.

“Walsall is going through rapid cultural change with regard to information management and we acknowledge at the highest level how the GIS system plays a major role in successfully sharing information and improving service delivery to our customers.

“It also enables us to better manage our road safety management programme which has as its objective to reduce the number of road-related incidents and hopefully save lives in Walsall.”

The national conference was attended by over 250 delegates from authorities and emergency service organisations from across the UK.

Walsall’s history of GIS dates back to some 10 years, when small pockets of the organisation viewed the system as an emerging piece of technology. Little did it know how important the GIS system was to become in the business of local government.

Tracey Lister, Walsall Council’s GIS coordinator added: “Special recognition should be reserved for the council’s information computer technology service who sought to secure funding to maintain the GIS coordinator post that has ultimately led to the achievement of this award.”