The Award-Winning Dynamic Speed Sign makes it possible for road users to benefit from reduced journey times during off peak operations, while the workforce are protected by a lower speed limit during working hours or incidents. When used together with the Works Egress System facilitating the safe departure of site vehicles into live lanes of traffic, these two solutions offer an improvement in safety and an efficient and effective way to control speed through works areas.
Speed limits through roadworks are typically set to 50mph to protect roadside workers and allow works vehicles to safely exit work sites. From a road user perspective, the 50mph limit can bring frustrations due to the increased travel time and tailgating lorries.
Smart Motorways come with permanent gantries that can dynamically display changes in the speed limit to improve traffic flow and improve safety during incidents. Implementing a temporary solution that delivers similar control during the construction phases is highly desirable and allows 60mph running when safe, while reducing the speed limit to 50mph or 40mph when there is peak site activity or during incidents.
Typically, temporary ‘Works Traffic Merging’ road signs are used to warn road users or vehicles merging from a work zone into a live lane. Due to the length of these work zones and the number of different signs used, ‘driver sign blindness’ is a real issue.
As a result, road users may overlook or not even notice a merging vehicle, leading to potentially devastating consequences.
With the goal of increasing the temporary speed limit through roadworks to 60mph, the speed differential between works vehicles exiting works areas and live lane vehicles is also increasing. This potentially makes it harder for works vehicles to exit sites safely and can compromise safety.
HRS have worked with key industry stakeholders to develop an intuitive, easy-to-deploy system that detects works vehicles as they are about to merge into live lanes and warns oncoming traffic via variable message signs (VMS).
See the Component Services pages below for an individual overview on each of these services.
“The system allowed us to adapt the temporary road speed to suit the contract works, instantly and effortlessly, thereby maintaining a high level of safety whilst protecting our Workforce and the General Public.”