Herefordshire Council
Efficient, cost-effective highways maintenance with Idox’s Aligned Assets gazetteer

Overview:

Herefordshire Council’s success with its Local Street Gazetteer (LSG)

Herefordshire Council uses Idox’s Aligned Assets gazetteer to support the highest national standards in location data accuracy, both for properties and streets, enabling it to maintain a zero discrepancy rating in the GeoPlace Comparison Report. Using the gazetteer, the council can create and maintain its Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) and Local Street Gazetteer (LSG) to the British Standard BS7666. This case study highlights Herefordshire’s success with its LSG.

Challenge:

Shortcomings in the sub-contractor’s system to record address data in the right format

A key purpose of the LSG is to record and enable effective management of highways maintenance, which Herefordshire sub-contracts to Balfour Beatty. Historically, the council used the data held by Balfour Beatty to present the street works. However, there were shortcomings in the sub-contractor’s system; it was unable to split a street by its Elementary Street Unit (ESU), i.e. the record that spatially defines a street between nodes and/or junctions. There were also restrictions with what other street data could be exported from the LSG into Balfour Beatty’s system, such as winter maintenance and gritting routes, primary route networks, parking data or specific engineering information.

Solution:

Using the Aligned Assets LSG for detailed address information

To overcome these limitations, Herefordshire phased out the use of Balfour Beatty’s system and instead now uses the more detailed information from the Aligned Assets LSG, exporting the necessary data to the sub-contractor.

Using a mapping app on its website, the council can pull information on road maintenance and Public Rights of Way from the LSG. This allows the public to search and view the road adoptions on an interactive map, for example to easily see whether a road is council owned, privately owned or has combined ownership. Each street record pulls the road name, town and USRN from the LSG. The public can also use the system to report faults on the highways. And because it records the location of the fault to its ESU level, the council can easily determine who has maintenance responsibility for that section of highway, and ensure the fault gets resolved quickly.

Outcome:

Efficient, cost-effective highways maintenance with improved data quality

With the highways team recording data directly into the LSG, and the public’s interaction with fault reporting, the LSG is seen as the best solution for exact street data. To further enhance the system, the council is working with Buchanan Computing to receive Traffic Regulation Order data from its ParkMap system direct into the LSG. This benefits the highways team, as the gazetteer can hold extra information; for example, co-ordinates, location descriptions and Additional Street Data (ASD) categories defined by national standards. It also ensures even more accurate reporting from the LSG.

Sam Morris, BS7666 Technician for Herefordshire Council comments: “Producing and sharing reports from Idox’s Aligned Assets LSG has greatly improved the quality of data held by external agencies, such as our sub-contractor, Balfour Beatty. In turn, this means we are delivering highways maintenance much quicker, more cost-effectively and smarter.”

“This is exactly how we like to see the gazetteer being used,” says Dinesh Thanigasalam, Head of Sales for Address Data Solutions, Idox. “With the relevant teams and the public recording data directly into the LSG against accurate street addresses, substantial time-savings can be made. We’re seeing a marked increase in the complexity of use of the gazetteer, providing streamlined processes and efficient delivery for all.” Idox’s Aligned Assets LLPG/LSG gazetteer, with its built-in health checks for maintaining the BS7666 standard, has enabled Herefordshire Council to build and manage an accurate and reliable repository for its street data. The automated exporting of required information to GeoPlace, e.g. primary route networks, winter maintenance routes and pedestrian crossings/traffic signals/traffic sensors, has also enabled the council to keep its industry-recognised Gold Standard status.

Idox acquired Aligned Assets in 2021, bringing together the pioneering Aligned Assets solution with its own built environment software to offer the most accurate and comprehensive address data solutions on the market.