General Information

The side effects from bridge collisions in the UK are colossal, wasted journeys, blocked and congested routes and costly repairs to structures. Before now there hasn't been an effective method to prevent such collisions and wasted journeys, drivers relied mainly on the Truckers Atlas to help them avoid such obstacles. As soon as sat nav became affordable many drivers were saying " why doesn't someone put this info into the sat nav ?".

Well now we have and have established ourselves as the market leader in satellite data. There has been a lot of interest in our products since launch, from press, trade magazines, sole drivers, insurance companies and media. We don't have to try and convince drivers that our data is useful they all know exactly how useful it is. We even have European drivers buying it ready for a visit to the UK !

Collisions with low bridges cost hauliers, railway companies and insurance organisations around £70 million a year. Most of these collisions can be avoided by using our new Low Bridge warning and re-routing product.

We already provide a large number of data sets (Points of Interest or "overlays") to drivers for tomtom and other satellite devices. We had numerous enquiries about Low Bridge Data and so we realised that developing a Low Bridge alert and avoidance product would be a good move.

After careful research we found that to be truly useful to the haulage and transport industry we would need to survey more than 97% of the UK Low Bridges as well as having more entries than the established method for avoidance, which was using the AA Truckers Atlas.

We knew that business would be depending on the data and so a data set with holes in it wouldn't do, as this could lead to serious frustration and lack confidence in our product.

Collecting the Data

We kicked off by contacting all of the major owners of bridge infrastructure within the UK, including railways, local councils, transport agencies, highways depts and borough councils. We amassed a huge amount of data and then sent out survey teams during the summer of 2004/2005 to verify these locations, as well as using the latest satellite imaging systems to check the information.

WE SURVEY ALL OF THE UK ROAD NETWORK

We also drive the UK network all the time, along with our users and have setup a feedback mechanism do that our drivers are incentivised to send us info and keep it up to date.

Developing the Product

We now have over 3000 recorded Low Bridges, each with location and its height in feet and metres. This includes over 400+ in London which is a complex area to work in. The next challenge we faced was to develop a working method to use the data that actually helped drivers. Until the manufacturers include a facility to AVOID a user loaded Point Of Interest we had to come up with something. (update: we are in discussions with 2 manufacturers who are both looking at integrating the avoid feature into their software). We used the tomtom series as our base platform due to popularity and ease of use with POI's.

Using the very latest satellite images of the UK we checked and recorded the data as well as the possible routes that could be taken, in an umber of test journeys. We then developed a way to plan and avoid the Low Bridge POI's as you drive. We then actually tested this in real road journeys to make sure that it all worked correctly. That's why we have come up with a number of ways that the data can be used, from full journey planning the nigh before a journey to an easy to use method to get it all up and running within 30 mins. Our manuals give an insight into these techniques and for those interested see our knowledge base

The Magic Box ?

Imagine a magic box - it sits on your dashboard and helps you drive. It tells you about the weather, traffic conditions ahead, it tells you where to drive and what to avoid. It lets you know the time, how long your journey will take and how long you have left to drove.

Finally it tells you about your surroundings, helps you avoid areas that are difficult to drive in, stops you from having to drive down a small residential road as you are making a delivery only to find a bridge you cant go under. It prevents you from having to reverse all the way back up that road, damaging cars on each side, bollards and fences. IT helps ensure that you don't have the police attending the scene and don't have to make an insurance claim.

To See more info, see our information sections below.