Driven by information revisited - Stepping up a gear

He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and a Trustee of the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund. [...] The public purse funds the development and delivery of services and data, such as GLOSA and IVS and other ‘digital road services’, to secure a public benefit that is free at the point of use. [...] Many of those interviewed for this project said the biggest block to cash savings from innovation in asset management, and hence decarbonisation and better services for drivers, was the way the UK currently prescribes what technology to use to collect data for roads and footways and then how to use it. [...] 3.3.5 Who pays? What remains in almost all the services examined is the key question of ‘who pays’? This is because of the absence of a business model to justify commercial investment in service development and provision, or of a sufficiently compelling economic/social benefit to justify the public sector taking the lead. [...] The ask of government here is not to fund the service directly, but to prioritise the resources needed to deliver the rapid digitisation of the TRO system and the NPP that it relies on (which is part of the public-sector funding in the previous section).