An enjoyable day at the Surveyor conference

An interesting and excellent range of papers presented at this week’s Surveyor / ILP Highway Lighting Conference in Leicester.

The key note address given by Councillor Rory Palmer, Cabinet Lead and Deputy City Mayor for Leicester City Council gave a concise and to the point address acknowledging the problems Authorities have with budgets but hit the right note by stressing the importance of calling on competent technical experts to provide innovative solutions to the problems.

Alistair Scott, the Chair of the BSi 5489 review panel then updated us with the direction of the new standard due out later this year. This was followed by Nick Smith looking at the specific aspects of the lighting of conflict areas and Steve Fotios then addressed the requirements for pedestrians to have the same visual benefits under any light source used for residential roads and the application of S/P ratios. Both Nick and Steve’s aspects that will form part of the new standard of which a draft will be issued for public comment shortly.

Peter Harrison discussed the development of the forthcoming ILP Professional Guide (PG) for seasonal lighting and attachment’s and Keith Henry (VP Technical) the PG regarding Central Management Systems, both of which are due for publication before the ILP Summit. Alistair then took to the podium again, standing in for Dave Burton, discussing how a lighting professional may look to demonstrate their competency through an approach being implemented by the ILP.

The conference finished off with Glyn Williams of Cornwall updating us on the progress of their invest to save programme, lessons learnt and savings actually achieved and what they are looking to next in the way of profiling. I then closed the conference explaining the LoTAMB (London Transportation Asset Management Board) new framework documents to aid an Authority develop a Lighting Value Management Model such that their funds can be targeted at precisely the areas and equipment that requires highest attention which can be down loaded from the LoLEG web site and will soon be issued as a national document through the ILP and LoTAMB.