We know Highways. And we deliver.

Ringway, as part of the wider Vinci Construction UK Group, manages and maintains over 43,300km of the UK’s highways network. Ringway offers best practice operations, maintenance and whole life asset management services.

Our services are flexible; enhanced by access to self-delivery across multiple specialisms, as well as the best practice we have developed through supporting local and strategic highways authority customers over the past 40 years. Working together with our clients, we deliver with local accountability and local people who take pride in the services they deliver.

Specifically in Hertfordshire we work on behalf of the County Council to maintain over 5,000 km of carriageways which we grit through the winter, empty the drainage gullies (there are over 180,000 of these), cut the grass and repair any faults. Alongside this there are over 5,600 km of footways and 143 km of dedicated cycleways. The other things that we look after are:

• 1,627 Structures including Bridges, Retaining Walls, Culverts, Sign Gantries, High Masts, Tunnels and Underpasses

• 142,518 Street Lighting columns, Subway lights, Illuminated Signs, Belisha Beacons, Bus Shelters, Centre Island Beacons and Safety Bollards

• 7,629 Intelligent Transport Systems sites (Traffic Signals, Zebra Crossings, Vehicle Activated Signs, Cameras, Traffic Counters, School Crossing/EMS/VMS Signs, Real time passenger info and Car Park Signs)

All our work is done in line with Hertfordshire’s Defect Management Approach which sets out our service standards and, when and how the repair of each defect is prioritised. All this is a mammoth task, and we employ nearly 400 staff to organise and complete this work, but we are proud that our average performance score has been over 97% for the last 3-years.

The Highway Service for Hertfordshire is a lot more than just Ringway and we have collaborative relationship with Hertfordshire and WSP Arup, who carry out designs and provide professional services. Together we have worked to produce a Service more aligned to customers needs; proud of the progress it has made; and with improved ownership of issues by all levels of staff. The collaboration has also enabled the Service to focus more on the benefits it is trying to deliver for the communities it serves, rather than just the delivery of the tasks themselves.

To operate the Service efficiently we use a lot of technology. Since 2012 Ringway started an increasingly data-driven approach to service delivery through innovation, trials and the subsequent adoption of best practice, this has included:

• Measuring road surface deterioration using AI cameras, developed and trained to identify defects, utilising machine learning. The cameras detect defects and calculate an overall condition score for each section of road.

• Using Esri ArcGIS to heat-map flood locations, defect clusters and other hotspots since 2017. The innovative addition of ESRI on gangs’ tablets has transformed work practices, enabling real-time capture of accurate location and works information for assets on the network. This ability to identify hotspot issues/ areas requiring intervention has contributed to a reduction in enquiries from the public from 49,305 in 2013/14 to 21,431 in 2022/23.

• Rolling out Hertfordshire’s LED lighting programme to replace 130,000 basic lights with a connected network of controllable lights.

With such a large service that impacts so many people sustainability is very important to us. We work very hard on our environmental impacts. 99% of waste from the contract is recycled and over 31,000 Tonnes of excavation spoil is reprocessed annually and returned for reuse in Hertfordshire. We operate a large fleet of vehicles in Hertfordshire and are moving across to more environmentally friendly fuel sources where we can. For example, all our new cars and vans are now EVs and the majority of our larger trucks run on HVO (hydrotreated vegetable oil).

The Social Value we bring to Hertfordshire is very important to us particularly because the majority of our staff live in the County where they work. We support a number of charities with donations and also help with projects that they are working on. We are very proud of the work that we do with local schools and particularly with Step2Skills on the Supported Employment project offering employment opportunities to underrepresented groups. www.ringway.co.uk