Congestion has been part of the UK transport conversation for decades. British drivers waste around 80 hours a year in traffic, at an estimated economic cost of £8bn. Yet traffic volumes continue to rise, showing no sign of fading. What has changed however is the room for manoeuvre. Public finances are tight, net zero commitments loom, and large-scale road expansion is increasingly difficult to justify environmentally and politically.

Caroline Hildreth is principal at Netcompany

That doesn’t mean performance can’t improve, but the gains are far more likely to come from using the network better, rather than building more of it.

The reality is that our roads have never been more instrumented. Cameras, urban traffic control systems, bus tracking feeds, weather data, third-party navigation platforms and incident management tools generate a continuous flow of data. Modern control rooms bristle with screens and systems. The truth is, we’re data rich but insight poor. The difficulty isn’t capturing information; it’s making sense of it fast enough to act.

Life inside a control room

Any major metropolitan transport authority managing millions of daily journeys across highways, buses, and trams, operators will need to monitor over 30 separate applications each shift – each serving a distinct purpose and rarely designed to work together.

When an incident occurs, an operator might notice something unusual on one dashboard, switch to CCTV to confirm it, check vehicle locations to understand service impact, then move to another system to log or communicate the response. It was less of a single workflow and more a series of hops between platforms.

That constant switching takes its toll. It increases cognitive load, fragments attention and makes it harder to establish a shared, real-time picture of what’s actually happening. Meanwhile, the disruption continues to ripple outward.

This challenge is compounded by a growing skills gap. Experienced operators carry deep local knowledge that takes years to develop, and when they leave, that institutional memory goes with them. Recruiting and training replacements is slow and costly, placing even greater strain on already stretched teams. Many of the people working at the heart of highways operations are not IT specialists, they are on the ground, managing incidents and network flow. For them, the promise of digital transformation must be practical. It cannot mean more interfaces that complicate matters.

This situation is not the result of poor decisions, it’s what happens when point solutions are procured incrementally over many years to address specific problems. These systems were each introduced for good reasons, but the unintended consequence is an operational landscape that lacks coordination.

Moving beyond integration

The sector has spent years talking about integration, yet simply connecting systems does not necessarily produce coherent operations. What matters more is orchestration: the intelligent coordination of multiple systems working in concert, creating a single operational environment in which information is not just visible, but structured, prioritised and actionable.

In a recent UK proof-of-concept exercise for a major UK city transport authority, Netcompany configured its Pulse platform to sit above the existing estate rather than replace it. Static datasets such as traffic signals, CCTV locations and tram alignments were brought together with live feeds, including bus positions and third-party incident reports. The objective was straightforward: create one operational view instead of many partial ones.

Pulse is built on a modular architecture with secure data adapters and a configurable rules engine. Underneath the interface sits a unified data model, allowing different types of input, from a reported collision to a bus delay, to be interpreted consistently. That structure matters because it enables operational logic to be embedded directly into the system.

The practical effect is that when an alert is triggered, severity thresholds and business rules are applied automatically. A visual sphere of influence shows which routes or modes may be affected and suggested actions appear within the same environment. The rules engine can also trigger automatic interventions, adjusting signal timings, rerouting information or escalation alerts, based on pre-defined rules. Initially, these automations are validated by a human before being executed, providing a safety net while the system’s logic is tested. Over time, the balance shifts: interventions that once required manual approval become increasingly automated, freeing operators to focus on the exceptions that need human judgement.

Nothing revolutionary was installed at the roadside. The change happened in the way information was organised, presented, and actioned.

From awareness to foresight

Real-time operational awareness is valuable in its own right, but its true potential lies in what comes next. Once a network is being monitored through a single orchestrated view, the system begins to learn. Patterns emerge, how disruption cascades from one corridor to another, which junctions are most sensitive to weather. That accumulated intelligence creates the foundation for predictions and stimulations.

With an expanding operational dataset, transport authorities can begin to model scenarios before they happen. Rather than relying solely on the experience of individual operators, which is increasingly difficult to retain and transfer, questions can be explored through simulation, tested against historical data and used to inform forward planning.

Interoperability as core infrastructure

Orchestration in transport rests on interoperability. For it to deliver at scale, secure APIs, shared standards and clear data governance frameworks need to be treated as core infrastructure – not peripheral concerns.

Faster incident detection shortens congestion and cuts the emissions associated with stop-start traffic. Greater multimodal visibility makes it easier to prioritise buses or emergency vehicles during disruption. Overlaying weather or event data adds further resilience.

The technology to do this is not speculative, it is already mature and proven in transport networks across Europe. What has been missing is the will to organise it in a way that reflects how transport networks actually operate: as interconnected, multimodal systems that demand a single view.

The UK’s road network won’t grow dramatically in the coming decades, but its capacity to perform can. The organisations that move first, treating orchestration as a core operational infrastructure, will set the standard for how modern transport networks are run. The next phase of traffic management will be defined less by how much new infrastructure we build, and more by how intelligently we coordinate what is already there.

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