North Yorkshire's Digital Highways

As the largest county in England and Wales, North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC) has the responsibility to maintain more than 9,000 kilometres of roads - and their associated pavements and verges.

Determined to make best use of modern technology, the Council's Highway Asset Manager Doug Huzzard instigated a major project to create a comprehensive electronic record of the County's highways, village greens and common land.

Following a detailed tendering exercise, NYCC appointed CDR Group to carry out this work. The task involved scanning, cropping and georeferencing paper maps and plans, scanning documents held in registers and files, and digitising the spatial extents of every area of maintained highway.

Of course all of the data is in regular use by NYCC's staff, so in order to minimise disruption a careful programme of work was agreed, whereby CDR collected regular batches of plans and documents and returned them as soon as they had been processed.

In addition NYCC's staff were able to contact CDR at any time to retrieve information that was needed urgently. Likewise CDR were in regular contact with NYCC staff with queries regarding missing or incomplete data, or ambiguous data. GIS Projects Director Tony Witham was delighted with the excellent rapport that soon developed between the two teams, and the valuable assistance CDR received, in particular from Network Information Officer Alan Fullerton and Technical Assistant Nicola Mahood.

In total CDR produced more than 17.000 scanned images, several hundred pdf documents, and digitised countless polygons using the specialist software they have developed for use within MapInfo.