London Trial Sees Coordinated Street Works by Utility Firms

The Greater London Authority (GLA) recently completed a project that has successfully showed how civil engineering work by three different utility providers – full fibre UK broadband ISP G.Network, water firm Thames Water and gas supplier SGN – can be combined and coordinated to help reduce disruption, cut costs and save time.

At present it’s true to say that, with some limited exceptions, many of the street works that we all see outside our homes and offices can be fairly uncoordinated and this tends to result in a lot of disruption, with new works often kicking off soon after another batch completed in the same area. In fairness, such works can be complex and have very different needs.

However, the GLA recently began making more active use of their newly developed Infrastructure Coordination Service (ICS), which is free to access for councils and utility companies. In simple terms, the new service attempts to tackle this problem by getting utility companies to share data and coordinate their planned works.

One of the first true deployments (i.e. not a pilot) of this service was recently used during an 11-week closure of the residential and 700 metres long Sunnyhill Road area in the London Borough of Lambeth, which combined a major road resurfacing project with three planned utility upgrades from G.Network, Thames Water and SGN.

According to New Civil Engineer, gigabit broadband operator G.Network kicked off the work by installing 600 metres of fibre optic cable by open trenching. This was followed by Thames Water installing 500m of new water main – using directional drilling – and then SGN adding 50m of new gas mains, before final resurfacing work.

The ICS didn’t just help to coordinate all this, but it also helped the utility firms to identify the opportunity for an overlap in the first place via its mapping tool (i.e. records of all planned and future works in the area). The team estimates that bringing the four parties together like this has saved 55 days of disruption.

Prior to all this, the original pilot phase achieved a wide range of results. For example, the Streets Service delivered eight collaborative street works projects, saving over 426 days of disruption; achieving £799,000 of cost savings to works promoters; and creating an estimated social value of up to £4.1m

By contrast, we believe the latest work forms part of a second phase of ICS delivery, which will extend the service’s use to cover more projects and develop a longer-term strategy for the future of the service. Last year, the Mayor of London approved establishment of the ICS expansion phase with £3.5m grant funding from the city’s Lane Rental Scheme Surplus Income to cover core expenses. The expansion phase runs until June 2023.

A previous report from data analytics firm Inrix showed that delays caused by traffic congestion on London’s streets cost the economy £4.1bn a year, with 15% of that being directly attributed to siloed and uncoordinated street work. Suffice to say, it’s easy to see why a collaboration search function like ICS, which makes it simple to spot overlaps between planned works and harness those, is so attractive.

The hope is that the ICS can now be extended and perhaps even enhanced to create oversight that extends over years rather than just weeks.