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Roads roundup

Highways England has confirmed it will spend £600M on roads in the North East by 2020, starting or completing six major road schemes and carrying out further development of further four major schemes. 

Don’t miss this. During the winter months of 2014/15, ITN Productions followed Ringway Jacobs’ operational gangs for its new television series about highway maintenance and management, ‘Stop! Roadworks Ahead’. The first of the six, one hour episodes will be shown on Monday 13 July, at 8pm on Channel 5, with the series featuring the work of Cheshire East Highways, Essex Highways and Transport for Buckinghamshire. The first episode features Essex Highway’s project on the Army and Navy roundabout in Chelmsford. For a weekly synopsis of each episode, visit www.ringwayjacobs.com/updates.

The Highways Term Maintenance Association (HTMA) has produced an environmental training DVD, Sustainable Highway Maintenance, to support member organisations and their clients with environmental awareness and management.  The DVD is also available for general use within the highways maintenance and management industry. The DVD is available to view via the HTMA website, www.htma.info.  Hard copies of the DVD can be purchased at a nominal price by contacting the Secretariat.

The government has launched a £20M competitive fund for collaborative research and development into driverless vehicles, along with a code of practice for testing. The measures announced by Business Secretary Sajid Javid and Transport Minister Andrew Jones are intended to put the UK at the forefront of the intelligent mobility market, expected to be worth £900bn by 2025. The government wants bidders to put forward proposals in areas such as safety, reliability, how vehicles can communicate with each other and the environment around them and how driverless vehicles can help give an ageing population greater independence. Successful bidders will match fund projects with their own money.