• Les Biggs drives his van for about 10 hours
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a day. From 07:30 to 17:30hrs he averages 80 deliveries — about one every eight minutes. Some of those packages are frozen organisms with a life-or-death shelf life, destined for hospitals or laboratories.
With such an intensive programme, a traffic jam could ruin his entire day. As an independent operator contracted to Business Post, he could lose money or, worse still, his reputation for reliability.
BLACKSPOTS
That made him the ideal candidate to test a device designed to help operators avoid congestion blackspots and accidents on major routes in and around London. It's called Trafficmaster, and the £30 a month rental fee could be more than recovered in a single day if it helped Biggs avoid a late delivery.
Specific stretches of the motorways or areas of central London can be brought into the display. Symbols superimposed on the map indicate delays and show the speed and direction of the affected traffic. For a full explanation of the cause of any particular problem, the symbols tell the operator which "page" to look for; on that page will be found details such as: "Range Rover in accident close to Junction 3. Southbound traffic limited to 15mph; northbound at a standstill."
The information is updated every three minutes, 24 hours a day from a central control. Trafficmaster can also display personal messages for individual drivers, although this costs extra.
The "pages" (up to 12 at the moment) are simply displays which are called up by pressing an appropriate button a number of times. Biggs says he took about 20 minutes to get used to the system.
Fitting Trafficmaster takes about an hour. It is located on a small rotatable frame on the dashboard so it can be adjusted to the most convenient position.
Biggs did not find the screen to be a dangerous distraction, once it was set up in the optimum position. The swivel also allows a driver's mate to act as navigator.
Once removed from its holder Trafficmaster will continue to operate on its own batteries for up to eight hours, so it could stay on a traffic manager's desk, allowing him to relay information to his fleet by radio or cabphone.
CM saw this system in action during a shift as Biggs' co-driver. Overhearing his controller sending out a message to one of the fleet's truck drivers, he called in and advised against sending the driver on that particular section of the motorway: "Southbound traffic's moving at 15mph. A lorry shed its load about five minutes ago," he said. "Tell him to go down another route."
During our shift we called into one of Biggs' clients, who operates an 24-hour express repair service. Biggs mentioned that the receptionist had a Trafficmaster on her desk. "She hasn't got central London on her's yet," he said. And central London information is not yet as precise or as up-to-date as that of the motorways. In that area Trafficmaster uses data from sources such as the police and motoring organisations. It is updated as information becomes available, but not on the three-minute system used for the motorways. Both kinds of information are of use to the wide range of vehicles working out of Business Post's Harrow office, from motorcycles and car-derived vans to panel vans and HGVs.
"I've got three kinds of deliveries to make every day," he says. "The 'before 9am', the 'am', and the others. The first kind are critical — they have to be delivered by 9 O'clock, no matter what happens or what's in the way." That's no idle boast; on the morning we joined him Biggs' first drop was a batch of serum packed in dry ice for a public health lab.
RUSH-HOUR
It had come down from Scotland overnight via Business Post's Birmingham hub; it was Biggs' job to make sure that London's rush-hour traffic didn't stop it arriving on time.
He generally gets to the depot by 05;30hrs to sort out the day's deliveries, so he's tackling traffic for 12 hours before the half-hour run home round the M25 where Trafficmaster comes in handy: "At least I won't be late for supper," he says.
Trafficmaster now has 2,000 users, a figure which is expected to rise to 7,000 during the next two years. At present it covers routes within a 55km radius of London, but will be extended to reach Bristol, Birmingham, Southampton and Dover by early 1993.
CI by Fabian Acker