Sign of the times .....

26 January 2009, 11:18am

Using the R8 in Warkworth

Sign of the times Northumberland County Council chooses latest Trimble technology
for road markings and signs survey

Following the implementation of the Traffic Management Act 2004 in April last year, Northumberland County Council is ensuring that it is perfectly placed to introduce Civil Parking Enforcement by reviewing all its existing Traffic Regulation Orders (TRO) with the help of a new Trimble R8 Rover used in conjunction with Trimble’s VRS Now service.

Before testing the system, the Council’s Traffic Safety Team looked at various ways of carrying out the review and consulted with a number of different Local Highway Authorities.

Owing to the legal requirements and interpretation issues of the order, they decided to use a high accuracy GPS to collect the site information, which could then be easily transferred to their corporate ESRI GIS. Using GPS at this stage would also benefit the Council’s eventual move to ‘map based’ orders.

Already familiar with Trimble technology and KOREC’s service and support, Northumberland County Council’s Traffic Safety Team tested a Trimble R8 with VRS Now to ensure that the system met the main criteria they were looking for – high accuracy, software flexibility, ease of use for the surveyor, equally suitable for an engineer (so that preloaded data on the controller could be taken on site and orders updated following resurfacing etc.), straightforward downloading and ability to validate collected data.

Independent Consultant for the project, Terry Luck, explains. “Our Team has a lot of experience in building in-house Asset Management Systems for Highways, so we knew exactly what we wanted a new system to deliver - the Trimble system met all our criteria. The main benefit is that we need just one surveyor to carry out the work and that we can capture a huge range of useful positional and attribute information due to the flexibility of the software. Not only are we recording line colour, width, type, sign type, size etc, but also non TRO information such as condition, which I feel provides a platform for greater use of the system in that it now interfaces with maintenance work orders. This has obvious cost benefits.”

Once collected, the surveyor downloads the data and makes his initial edits the same day as the survey. The data is then loaded into Northumberland’s GIS using ESRI’s Arcview and checked again.

By using the R8 in conjunction with Trimble’s VRS Now Service, the Traffic Safety Team has been able to benefit from instant access to RTK corrections without the need for, or additional cost of a base station. Terry concludes. “The VRS Service has delivered the accuracy we required, even in an urban setting. We are consistently achieving +/-10-15mm and have had only limited problems when surrounded by very high buildings - any issues were quickly identified in the first stage of validation checks. Overall, the kit has been easy to use and KOREC’s support has been very good. In April, Northumberland County Council will become a unitary authority and the success of this TRO Review demonstrates how a consistent approach to the collection of data, and ultimately the production of TRO's, could easily be extended across the whole of the new authority of Northumberland.”


VRS Now service to extend
The performance of the Trimble R8 VRS system will be further enhanced when the Trimble VRS Now service extends beyond its two current GNSS areas in the South East and Scotland and becomes fully GNSS enabled across the whole UK.

As the Ordnance Survey roll out new GNSS CORS receivers Trimble VRS Now will offer many more satellites in view as shown in the sky plots below. The Surveyors and Engineers of Northumberland County Council will then be able to work with even more ease in built up areas and other places with poor sky visibility, improving productivity and maximising their investment.

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