Transport User Voice – September 2020 – Our latest work with Highways England

27 August 2020

What we’re doing for road users

Transport Focus has been working on behalf of road users to get Highways England to drive improvements where needed – both through our reports and our Sort My Sign campaign.

A significant part of our work on roads is working directly with Highways England’s regions. We make sure that every region is aware of the research that we do and the recommendations that we make. Transport Focus staff regularly attend meetings in each region, providing the user voice to improve a number of areas, including roadworks, diversion routes, and overall satisfaction through the Strategic Roads User Survey (SRUS).

While making sure that users are at the heart of longer-term plans and improvements, for example pushing for more appropriate speed limits through roadworks to adopting better, clearer messaging on electronic road signs, we also make sure that we continue to challenge day to day issues from our travels on motorways and major ‘A’ roads. These can be reported issues from a number of places and managed by our colleagues who lead in each region.

We feed our comments into each region directly and also using our ‘Sort My Sign’ reporting tool, following up on these reports to make sure repairs and maintenance are completed. This work is paying off, as we are able to see our reports turned into repairs. A good example of this is in the photo below of a broken sign that we reported, now fixed on the M61 in the North West.

Road users can also report issues directly through Sort My Sign. Transport Focus will then follow up these reports with Highways England to ensure that they are completed in each region.

Road signs are an important part of motorways and major ‘A’ roads and need to be kept clean, free of overgrown vegetation and repaired if damaged. We are looking to see Highways England pick up more of these issues directly, rectify quickly and at a pace that road users expect.

 

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