Our priorities
Innovation will support our strategic objectives and create value for our customers.
Innovation is critical if we are to achieve our three company imperatives:
Our themes for the next five years
Our Connecting the country report sets out our future vision for the Strategic Road Network up to 2050.
Together with our three imperatives, this is the guiding light for our innovation priorities.
We have prioritised the steps we need to take over the coming decades, including to operation and practice, under five themes. Within each of these themes, we have also established our priorities over the next 5-year road period to 2025:
Design construction and maintenance
We will aim to:
- remove exposure to harm for road workers, for example by reducing the need for human intervention in asset management and routine maintenance
- improve efficiencies throughout the lifecycle of our assets
- reduce disruption for road users through faster, high-quality on-site assembly of pre-fabricated components
- improve collaboration, planning, and risk mitigation during the design and construction phases projects
Connected and autonomous vehicles
We will aim to:
- prepare our road network for vehicles with varying levels of connectivity and autonomy
- develop UK standards and guidance for connected roads
- collaborate with industry to develop our use of connected and autonomous vehicles on our network
Customer mobility
We will aim to:
- help our customers to make informed decisions before and during journeys
- support smoother transitions for our customers when switching between transport modes. This includes developing our links with other transport networks
- help our customers feel safe, through on-demand, responsive support
- provide accurate, up-to-date information about third party services, such as car sharing and ride hailing, across our road network
- understand end to end journeys so we can support seamless journey experiences for our customers
Energy and the environment
We will aim to:
- reduce our consumption of non-renewable energy
- decarbonise our activities
- prepare our road network and operations for low emission vehicles
- reduce our demand and reliance on the power network so that we’re contributing to national energy resilience
- protect and harness the natural capital of our soft estate, including clean air and water, biodiversity and cultural heritage, to benefit people and the economy
Operations
We will aim to:
- improve temporary traffic management measures to protect road workers and road users
- enable more of our operational decisions to be data-led
- understand and address behavioural causes of incidents on our roads and on our work sites
- increase customer satisfaction by enabling informed real-time decision making and improved journey planning
Find out more about our themes and the types of initiative we are funding.
