"We've actually had big problems over the last few years over the growth in congestion, and congestion is our number one political issue," he said, "so what we've done is put a congestion strategy together. We went over to the UK a year and a half ago and looked at what Transport for London were doing and Highways England were doing and put together a strategic framework going forward and so we've taken a lot of ideas out of the UK and are trying to deliver those onto our network."
In the interview, Mr Troughton explained some of the key things that UK knowledge has helped with: "One of the main things is we've been doing a traffic signals review' we've been able to get remarkable efficiency improvements onto our routes where we've gained a 20 per cent travel saving and we've put an extra eight per cent traffic through it because we stop the rat runs. We're also rolling out our data to understand current situations so we're using practices as Transport for London with regards to travel time efficiency reliability and the like to measure our network and to therefore work through performance and we're also structuring in a similar way to they have done to manage that network."
And he said that British firms have a great opportunity to win business there: "Australia is a bit parochial at times but I think for specialist work and specialist advice we do look to the UK a lot for consulting firms' we're still a bit behind the game where we'd like to be in our asset management and I think there's a lot of room for improvement for us there."
You can hear his interview here:
[audio mp3="http://smarthighways.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/steve-troughton.mp3"][/audio]
