During this past week, LinkedIn has been ‘alight’ with references to Strictly Highways that we held last week at the iconic Winter Gardens in Blackpool, with articles posted by government officials, local highway authorities and our private sector partners – this truly was a great event, and I would like to thank everyone who participated either as a speaker, delegate or exhibitor.
It is rare that you get the opportunity to meet with so many key people from the highways sector in one place and I know that many of us made new connections and learned of new things going on in highways. I spoke with many old friends over the two days and a number of new ones too, and every conversation was enjoyable. I made some commitments to meet with a few of the attendees to both learn more about their business and share greater detail about LCRIG through the course of this year and this week have done just that. I was invited to spend some time with Bath and North East Somerset Council (BaNES) to meet client representatives and representatives from their private sector partner, Volker Highways.
It was evident that the client and provider were definitely on the same page when it came to delivering a customer focused service and the strength of their alignment, a testament to both parties, resulted in the ability to make agile and effective decisions. We toured one of their refurbished depots on the A37 in Clutton which exemplified ‘what good looks like’ when it comes to operating a site of this nature – everything was in its place and there was a real sense of pride exhibited by all those that I met.
We then took the opportunity to visit some of their maintenance operations and once again I was impressed with Thermal Road Repairs (TRR). BaNES had purchased the equipment from TRR and Volker personnel had been trained by TRR how to effectively operate the thermal repair machine and they were doing so with the greatest of skill. The fact that a thermal repair leaves no joints undoubtedly results in a more robust solution for our defects and is now their ‘go to’ solution for the right circumstances.
The team told me about other innovations and that they had recently trialled, a preservation treatment on parts of their network as they continue to jointly explore solutions that are faster, cheaper and better than traditional methods – well done BaNES and Volker Highways.