The Chief Technologist at TRL, Chris Kettell, is warning that Government and industry must do more to support the standards body underpinning the UK’s traffic technology sector, arguing that the cost of maintaining it is tiny compared with the risks of allowing it to decline.
In the latest contribution to the ongoing debate around standards and interoperability in highways technology, Mr Kettell has written a personal plea, ‘Who Maintains the Immune System? The Case for TOPAS‘ on the TOPAS (Traffic Open Products and Specifications) website, to highlight its role question whether its long-term funding model is sustainable.
The intervention follows recent calls from SWARCO, Yunex Traffic and others for highway authorities and suppliers to maintain adherence to nationally recognised standards as the sector prepares for major investment in replacing ageing traffic management assets.
Mr Kettell argues that while industry discussions often focus on the importance of standards, much less attention is paid to the organisations responsible for maintaining them. He points out that TOPAS oversees specifications covering a wide range of roadside equipment, including traffic signal controllers, variable message signs, vehicle detection technology, pedestrian facilities and UTMC interfaces.
He warns that the organisation operates on a modest income generated largely through product registration fees and industry support, despite its standards helping to underpin hundreds of millions of pounds of annual roadside technology procurement.
“The organisation responsible for the technical procurement standards underpinning hundreds of millions of pounds of annual roadside equipment spend across every highway authority in Britain runs on registration fees, goodwill, and a grant that expires,” he writes, and adds that this comes at a time when the Department for Transport is facing wider spending pressures and when industry bodies are calling for significant investment to tackle what ITS UK has described as the UK’s “DOTT-hole” of digitally obsolete traffic technology.
While supporting those calls for renewed investment, he argues that large-scale replacement programmes can only succeed if there is a strong and trusted framework for independently assessing products against national standards.
“A renewal programme procured without robust TOPAS compliance is not modernisation,” he writes. “It is the same problem, deferred by one product generation.”
Among Mr Kettell’s recommendations are greater use of TOPAS-registered products in procurement, universal product registration by manufacturers and the provision of a “modest”, long-term Government-backed funding stream for the organisation’s core activities.
He concludes that as highways technology becomes increasingly connected, data-driven and AI-enabled, standards bodies such as TOPAS will become more important rather than less, and that the industry needs to recognise their value before funding pressures create problems that are far more expensive to solve later.
Read the full post HERE.
(Picture: Yay Images)
