4 July 2012

A-one+, a joint venture between Costain, Colas and Halcrow, together with its supply chain partners Highways Resource Solutions and VeRSco, recently won honours at the Chartered Institute of Highways & Transportation’s Annual Awards.

The awards ceremony took place at Gibson Hall in London recently, where representatives from A-one+ joined HRH The Princess Royal, Lord Digby Jones Kt and over 300 guests.

A-one+ scooped four awards, including the winner of the Health & Safety at Work Award, for its work with Highways Resource Solutions in developing Intellicone, an integrated safety solution for road maintenance contractors that has helped to significantly enhance road worker safety.

In many cases road traffic cones are the only delineation that road workers have to the adjacent traffic and, if a cone barrier is breached, there is little or no way of alerting the road workers to the subsequent dangers.

A-one+ is the MAC Contractor for the Highways Agency in Areas 7, 10, 12, and 14. This includes operating and maintaining 1,700km of trunk roads and motorways in England, or roughly 32% of the national network.

Through a process of reporting near misses, A-one+ identified errant vehicles as one of the top risks that needed to be managed across its four MACs. A working group in Area 12 was set up to look at how innovative technology could combat the problem of errant vehicles.

Working with HRS, A-one+ developed a unique, low cost technology that turned ordinary traffic cones into an intelligent wireless network which is able to activate an alarm and report any perimeter breaches.

Intellicone received a commendation in the Innovation category and was recognised as an outstanding example of a new development that has made a positive contribution to the health and safety of employees and the general public.

Commending the Intellicone technology, the judges said: “The judging panel was very impressed by this novel idea and praised the project’s capability for widespread application for road works in the future. Judges highlighted the increased level of protection that it affords to road workers from the dangers of errant vehicles in high risk maintenance and work areas.”

A-one+ was also Highly Commended in the Sustainability category for its work in renovating vehicle restraint systems (VRS) which restores barriers to a required standard for re-use following an incident or general maintenance work. The team was recognised for helping to deliver a step change in its drive to deliver efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of its maintenance operations.

The judges described VRS as a “simple, clever idea; a step change and novel application of recycling which reduced the use of valuable resources. It provides sustainability through ease of use, quicker repairs from stock which is more readily available and also has significant environmental benefits by minimising the need for new material.”

 

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