News

Costain wins cutting edge connected vehicle technology contract to improve road safety

Costain has been awarded a flagship technology contract to install and implement one of the UK’s first pilot connected vehicle corridors on a live road in a move which hopes to show the UK as market leader in the connected and autonomous vehicle industry.

The smart infrastructure solutions company will be working for Highways England in collaboration with the Department for Transport, Transport for London (TfL) and Kent County Council on the A2M2 connected corridor.

The company will be responsible for delivering roadside technology and a testbed for Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) using data supplied by the trio of organisations involved in the contract.

It will mean motorists can automatically receive data from roadside units via ITS G5 wireless communication on a range of issues like roadworks, road conditions, temporary speed limits and the time remaining before a traffic light turns to green.  

Andrew Wyllie, Costain’s chief executive, said: “This is an important step in making our roads safer and improving journey time reliability by embracing cutting edge technology. It is a further demonstration of Costain’s capability and we look forward to leading the way with the deployment and testing of this exciting technology”.

Mike Wilson, safety, engineering and standards executive director at Highways England, said: "Having the technology in place to allow vehicles to connect to each other and the road around them has the potential to improve journeys, making them safer and more reliable by providing real-time, personalised information directly to the driver. It could also help us manage traffic and respond to incidents. The A2/M2 trial will test and demonstrate how this may work in the real world. We are delighted to be jointly funding and part of this international project."

Costain will deliver this contract with core partners, Mott MacDonald, 4way Consulting, TRL, Kapsch TrafficCom AG, Altran, Cohda Wireless, Telent Technology Services Ltd and Telefonica. 

The latest contract win follows the announcement of the group’s contract with Highways England to supply Motorway Incident Detection and Automated Signalling (MIDAS) technology systems to help improve road user safety and builds on the recent announcement of Costain’s key role supplying smart autonomous vehicle monitoring technology for the Midlands Future Mobility testbed.

If you would like to contact Ryan Tute about this, or any other story, please email rtute@infrastructure-intelligence.com.