CPE in Cambridgeshire

For the past few months, I’ve been working on introducing Civil Parking Enforcement (CPE) to the tri-district areas of South Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Fenland. The introduction of CPE can have benefits to the County in that it removes the liability for parking enforcement from the Police, who are already overly stretched as an organisation, and transfers this to local Highway Authorities (HA). By doing this HAs can better serve local communities by providing a localised and efficient parking enforcement operation with the proceeds being generated ring-fenced to cover operational costs and re-investment into the highway network.

?Part of the work involves collaborating with RTA Associates who have provided us with invaluable advice, insight and high-quality surveying work as part of our preparation for CPE. I’ve been using OrderPro, RTA’s purpose-built web platform, to map out the extent of the County’s Traffic Regulation Orders (TRO). The system allows me to assess each feature inventoried by the surveyors, this means that I can ensure the accuracy of our TROs on paper and on-street. Plans can then be delivered in .pdf to our contractor Milestone Infrastructure for further design work (if necessary) and subsequent installation.

It’s quite an arduous task, working through countless queries in a given geographical location. What I have enjoyed is the collaborative aspect of the project. Whilst we do tend to take it for granted that collaboration occurs within organisations, it’s very different where there are different stakeholders and project delivery teams at play. Milestone does regularly undertake large civil engineering projects, a piece of work of this type is unique and, has never been undertaken by either current County officers or Milestone Infrastructure previously to my knowledge.

It’s been an advantageous learning experience for me in that I’ve learnt more about traffic management (and best practice), and of course, CPE in general.