Connected Parking Award: Kent County Council ParkMap Project

British Parking Awards 2023

The team at Kent County Council, working in partnership with Buchanan Computing, are combining all Traffic Regulation Orders, both parking and waiting restrictions as well as those relating to moving traffic and speed limits, into a single, interactive web-based resource, putting up-to-date and concise information at all interested parties’ fingertips, in a clear and unambiguous way.

Traffic Regulation Orders (TROs) are documents containing the legal foundations for various kinds of highway restrictions: speed limits; banned turns; bus lanes; parking and waiting restrictions and beyond. Over time, these orders come to describe large numbers of sites and various sorts of restrictions, often with multiple types found in the same location. The potential for discrepancy and inaccuracy develops over time, impeding authority officers, utility companies, the public and other partners, as they seek to understand the nature and extent of control in the areas where they live.

The ParkMap Project was originally programmed to last 18-24 months and commenced in 2019. The challenges of a global pandemic extended this timescale. As part of the preliminary investigations, Kent County Council collaborated with 12 district authorities and Buchanan Computing, to review existing processes behind the drafting, production, and display of TROs and formulated common templates for all parking and waiting orders, promoting the best processes currently in place. The decision to create a consolidated, digitised solution for Kent led to the existing partnership with the Buchanan Computing to develop still further.

To enable Kent to ensure that the work was completed accurately, the 12 individual Kent district authorities required an intensive and accurate on the ground survey, to provide the consistent and accurate data relating to all signs and lines currently on the public highway. This also required all word-based paper TROs currently held by the county and district authorities to be brought together, checked for accuracy against all restrictions on the ground, anomalies to be identified and corrected and all 12 authorities to consolidate all their individual existing orders. This presented a challenge to all partners in a time of budget constraint and scarce spare officer capacity. However, following the time taken to confirm or amend, officers and the public can be confident that, moving forward, the resulting TROs match the restrictions that they find on-street.

It was also necessary to standardise the visual display of each individual restriction to allow a Kent countywide standard which would be easily understood by all viewing customers. Investigations were conducted and all existing best practice was combined and utilised. Only once this process was completed and all parties were satisfied that the information gathered was accurate and complete, could the process of plotting each individual order onto the ParkMap programme commence.

Kent County Council explored the opportunity to combine all TROs in one digital resource. To enable the funding of the project, the county council successfully applied for a full a grant from the Lane Rental Scheme Grant Board, which is an independent body who assess applications and award to those projects which evidence new and innovative projects that will provide efficiencies and added value.

Lorna Day, parking and enforcement manager at Kent County Council, says: “Whilst similar work has been undertaken in other parts of the country, this is the first time that all TROs will be shown in one location, on such a large scale, with the ability to be viewed by all interested parties on a web and map-based digital solution.”