Guidance for sat-nav users loses its way

The Ordnance Survey (OS), which has explored incorporating information on local traffic authorities’ recommended freight routes in the maps it sells to sat-nav firms, said this week that the project was parked.

Caroline Bullock, OS product manager, was challenged by delegates at an Institution of Highways and Transport conference to collate and keep up-to-date a national advised freight route.

But she responded: ‘We can’t possibly co-ordinate this. I’ve a team of three people. We would like somebody centrally to take control of this.’

The national traffic managers’ forum is now looking to the Department for Transport (DfT) to take a lead on the issue. Martin Low, director of transportation at Westminster City Council, said the forum wanted ‘the DfT and OS to be custodians of this data’, and to add data on new traffic regulation orders.

While the OS now holds a national dataset on bridge weight, width and height restrictions, Bullock said this alone ‘won’t get HGVs down the roads councils want them to use’. However, she said freight routes for adjacent council areas may not match up, and sat-nav firms might not use the data anyway.

Meanwhile, sat-navs are often deciding where traffic diverted off motorways is sent, rather than the Highways Agency, despite the agency having agreed ‘tactical diversionary routes’ with 116 local traffic authorities. Pete Smith, control room manager at the National Traffic Control Centre, said: ‘We don’t want Tom-Tom telling everybody where to go.’

However, the DfT, for its part, has declared that sat-navs ‘have the potential to reduce congestion and improve road safety’.

The DfT has suggested voluntary regulation to tackle the issue, where sat-nav companies would be asked, rather than required, to check that systems complied with routeing guidance.