The Intelligence Community of the English Highways Agency (HA) has an importantstrategic role to develop intelligence-led decision-making. The core of the work summarizedin this paper is making traffic data available to this community of Operational Researchers,Traffic Modelers, Statisticians and Analysts at finer spatial and temporal granularities acrossthe network than was previously available. Specifically, 1 minute for temporal and 500mspacing for spatial. Most of the traffic data currently captured by the HA is at this resolutionor better, for the majority of the busiest parts of the network. The aim was to make that dataavailable to users for marginal additional cost, representing a cost-effective way to makeimprovements in traffic data provision through taking additional advantage of existinginfrastructure.Like many organizations that have responsibility for the management, operation andmaintenance of transportation networks, the supporting systems have tended to evolveorganically and over many years. There is not normally the option to throw everything awayand start afresh, too much is already invested in existing assets that get re-used or added to inorder to service new requirements. This can lead to complex systems with interactions atsubsystem interfaces that are uncertain – how changes in one part will affect functionality inanother begins to feel like guesswork and an apparently trivial change can cause unwelcomeinstability in some remote part of the system. It is against this backdrop that the workdescribed in this paper was progressed to successful delivery.
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