Sharing our Work using Interesting Facts

We have recently trail-blazed a new way of communicating with customers when we’ve finished a scheme.

Our Customer Hub draws together Highways England, A-one+ and Transport Focus to provide a customer focus across the services we deliver. One opportunity we identified was to better share with our customers when we’ve completed a scheme. With 81% of our highway maintenance work completed overnight, the majority of our customers don’t even realise we’ve been there.

So, we introduced a process to capture what we’d done on a scheme by scheme basis using a simple one page post-scheme data template, completed by our project managers. Using interesting facts and figures we relate the work we’ve done to something that customers might more readily identify with. A recent example of this was a pavement renewal scheme on the A1 where our post-scheme data sheet recorded:

• The scheme saw 8.4 km of new surfacing laid, that’s nearly 1¼ times the length of the annual Cambridge and Oxford Boat Race on the River Thames.
• 1,600 new road studs and 18,800m of new white lining were installed. It would take quadruple Olympic champion Sir Mo Farah about 52 minutes to run that length of white lining.

We have used social media and web based platforms to share our post-scheme data sheets. One recent scheme on the A64 near York was picked up by a local BBC reporter who shared the work we had done on the BBC’s local news feed after seeing our post-scheme data sheet.