How Fluxx helped Croydon council save 5 years of disruption to the public
Creating a culture of collaboration and data-sharing is much harder than it looks, but in Croydon, utilities are now working together to reduce time and disruption
In 1998 Heineken’s famous TV ad generated laughter, and lager sales, by poking fun at roadworks.
Two decades later that advertisement remains, perhaps, the last time anyone has laughed at the plight of British roads. According to one study, drivers in some of the UK’s larger cities lose dozens of hours each year because of congestion. In 2017, the report said, the average driver in London lost 227 hours stuck in traffic.
Roadworks account for an estimated 15% of this congestion in London. But given the constant pressure on London’s subterranean infrastructure, and relentless wear and tear on its roads, roadworks are an unavoidable peril of life in big cities. But that doesn’t make it a peril that can’t be mitigated.
How often do you see a road being dug up by one company for repairs, only to be dug up a few months later by another company for different repairs? How often have you reached work late because of a road disruption? How often have you asked: Why can’t these guys just talk to each other?
That question, on the face of it, makes sense. Multiple utilities collaborating, with a ‘dig once’ approach, seems the logical solution to the problem of endless roadwork disruption.
So when the London Borough of Croydon engaged Fluxx, and our partners Atkins, to support them with solutions for collaborative roadworks, we all thought implementing the ‘dig once’ approach would be simple enough: just a matter of bringing multiple agencies together and solving a ‘coordination’ problem. Easy-peasy roadworks squeezy.
We started by reaching out to various utilities and asking them to share details of any planned works in the near future. We then used this data to overlay the information on an easy-to-read online map. Immediately we spotted potential: there was an overlap of works being planned by both SGN (gas) and Thames Water on Epsom Road in Croydon. What is more, the council was also due to resurface the very same road.
Here then was an ideal, real-world opportunity to illustrate the benefits of multi-utility coordination. We hosted a workshop attended by senior stakeholders from London Borough of Croydon, Thames Water, SGN and the Greater London Authority. It was amazing to have these people in the same room.
Attendees immediately bought into our vision for collaboration. Both utilities saw the value of jointly hiring a contractor and carrying out planned works simultaneously. Besides saving the public time and bother, it could save both utilities money and management time.
We went away from the workshop eager to translate this optimism into concrete work plans. The next step involved digging deeper into the practicalities.
Talking to procurement and operations teams at both utilities led us to a stark conclusion: collaboration was going to be much harder than we had thought.
We realised that under the current Construction, Design and Management (CDM) laws it was challenging for utilities to use the same sub-contractor. CDM rules stated that there had to be one principal designer for the project and one principal contractor onsite. But on Epsom Road, who would that be?
Not to mention the other problems on project compliance, construction standards and procurement policies that would make simultaneous works complicated if not impossible.
These constraints were not, of course, insurmountable. The project team were confident that, given time, these issues could be ironed out.
However, Epsom Road needed a solution right now before work got underway.
But was a solution even possible? The initial disappointment made us realise why many companies struggle to make collaboration a reality: there can simply be too much structural and financial friction.
Our utopian ‘dig once’ vision was just too hard to achieve in this timescale.
At this point we were tempted to close the project. But we didn’t. Instead we decided to convene another workshop, but this time with operations teams from both utilities and other senior stakeholders. Instead of going straight for the utopian solution, we wondered: What if the utilities didn’t carry out works at the same time, but collaborated enough to follow one after the other, on the same stretch of road? This was a considerable compromise on our original plan. But perhaps it was more feasible?
The constraints forced us to find a quick-fix solution that could work in the immediate future
In fact we are projected to save a full three months from the six months work on Epsom Road. This also led to substantial savings in permanent road resurfacing, repeated traffic management procedures and road closures.
As we started to calculate the potential savings, the numbers really started to add up. Reducing the overall disruption by 98 days meant that — for the 5,000 drivers who use the road each day, a total of five years of disruption was avoided, over 500,000 individual journeys.
Thus the constraints of CDM laws, instead of stifling us, forced us, our partners and our clients to think of an easy to execute quick-fix solution — one that could work in the immediate future. It made us realise that being too close-up to a problem, too aware of the constraints, or too focused on an ideal solution, can often blind us to simple solutions that can still deliver a lot of value.
A great solution is good. But a good solution is pretty great, too.
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Natasha is a senior innovation consultant at Fluxx and a former marketing and advertising professional. To find out more, write to natasha.lalwani@fluxx.uk.com
