The Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning & Transport (ADEPT) has published The Little Book of Live Labs 2, bringing together, for the first time, the top lessons, evidence, and tools from the Department for Transport funded £30 million Live Labs 2 programme. It means local highway authorities across the UK can adopt proven innovations rather than start from scratch.
The publication’s key message is that cutting carbon doesn’t have to cost more: carbon led approaches can help local highway authorities save money, work more efficiently and make local roads more resilient.
In an interview to be published on the afternoon of Thursday 15 October, Live Labs 2 Director Giles Perkins (pictured) told Highways News:
“The Little Book of Live Labs 2 is a short document that gives the reader, a bit of a concise sort of summary of what we’ve done on Live Labs, but really focusing on the benefits. And those benefits are cost, time, carbon, and other savings. So what we’ve done over the last three years, yes, we’ve counted lots of carbon, we’ve tested lots of products, but what is coming out of this, there’s actually significant and meaningful changes that can come out in terms of how we do things better, how we do things more productively how we can get carbon benefits.
“When people see a benefit that they actually need, that’s when they can dig in and find out more about how they actually deliver that benefit,” he continued. “And that’s the key thing in a nutshell. For too long, we’ve been focused on the technology, the product, the ‘silver bullets’ that always promise something.
“We need to be thinking around what are the outcomes that I want to achieve. So if I have to save money, if I need to do more with scarce resources, if I want to reduce carbon significantly, that also has to be in the context of, are we talking about term maintenance? Are we talking about a new project? So thinking about the outcomes and working backwards, not being led by, here is a product that we think is going to solve all of our problems.”
Highways Voices podcasts from Highways UK are sponsored by AGD Systems, Arcadis, Nicander, SWARCO and Westcotec.
(Pictures: ADEPT)
