PR342_P34-39_Essex TRO.qxp_PR342_p34-39 13/10/2020 13:34 Page 34
TRAFFIC ORDERS
When visiting a place, the public will be able to clearly see where they can and cannot park
Bringing order to the streets Essex County Council and its parking partnerships have embraced digitised, map-based Traffic Regulation Orders
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arking in Essex is very much a local process and managed by those that know the localities well and understand the local area and its parking requirements, the county’s borough and district councils. Essex County Council has devolved its parking function to two partnerships within the county, allowing these groups of local authorities to manage parking locally. Each partnership looks after the parking for six districts. The North Essex Parking Partnership (NEPP) is based out of Colchester, and the South Essex Parking Partnership (SEPP) is run out of Chelmsford. Together, representatives of the 12 districts, two partnerships and Essex form a joint committee that manages a co-ordinated approach to Essex’s parking. The parking partnerships bring together all street-based parking services in Essex. They aim to administer the parking rules to a fair, proportionate and consistent standard in order to provide a service in a reasonable and responsible way.
Seeking order While the creation, maintenance and enforcement of Traffic Regulation Orders (TROs) is devolved to the partnerships, Essex County Council is the local highways authority, so it retains the statutory authority for the maintenance of the county’s dataset of traffic orders. The county and parking partnerships have worked together to tackle the problem of inaccurate, inconsistent and inaccessible TROs. Essex’s dataset of TROs was difficult to keep up-to-date. Over time, and with different people having worked on them, anomalies
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in the styles of restrictions had crept into the orders from across the 12 districts. The TROs came in all manner of different formats and could not easily or consistently be made available to the general public. Some orders were hand-written and stored in archives; others were text-based, perhaps with graphic scans. Orders for some districts had been mapped and digitised, but others had not been mapped, and some traffic order schedules were completely missing. The orders were, therefore, difficult to access and to understand, especially for members of the public. Vicky Duff, network assurance group manager, Essex County Council, explains: “Without access to the regulations, Essex residents weren’t able to view the parking impacts on their localities. The council’s ethos is that people should have access to them. They should be able to understand where they can park and for how long – we’re not trying to create confusion.” Richard Walker, group manager for NEPP, adds: “We just couldn’t give everyone the full and complete parking order – it was in so many parts that they couldn’t simply look at it. Even the areas that had been mapped were done on a ‘polygon’ system, which is not easy for non-specialists to understand. It just wasn’t user-friendly for the public.” The concern over the increased disparity between the restrictions described in the districts’ orders and those restrictions that actually existed on the street gave rise to the understanding that they needed to start again. The county needed re-surveying from the ground up in order to provide consistent and accurate data. This was also an opportunity to make the digitised data accessible via the internet, displaying it in a way that the public could understand. Nick Binder is the South Essex Parking Partnership’s manager. He said: “One need was for some housekeeping – getting everything in order and up-to-date, validating that what it said on the road matched what we had, so that our enforcement could be in order.
