Traffic and People Counting - Early Market Engagement - July 2024

The purpose of this Prior Information Notice (PIN) is to notify the market of forthcoming market engagement event relating to the Transport for West Midlands (the transport arm of the West Midlands Combined Authority) to help determine future strategy for traffic and people counting services.

Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) is the public body responsible for co-ordinating transport services in the West Midlands and it is an executive body of the WMCA.

TfWM works with our local Highway Authority partners to make sure public transport is safe, accessible and reliable; we monitor and improve road safety; and also provide and manage the Regional Transport Coordination Centre (RTCC) for the West Midlands.

TfWM has a Data Insight service which sits within its Policy, Strategy and Innovation directorate.

The TfWM Data Insight team provides Data Stewardship to all data that is used in strategic transport planning, transport operations and transport policy at TfWM.

Providing a full end to end service for transport data collection, management, analysis, forecasting, research and producing data for our local authority partners.

The Data Insight team provides ongoing performance monitoring of activity on the transport network.

This service requires regular surveys of highways and public transport usage across the network to provide trend analysis over time.

Two of our surveys have been ongoing since the 1970s - the Cordon counts - biennial surveys of sites encircling nine strategic centres across the West Midlands and the 700 pt survey counting traffic at 700 locations biennially across the region on a rolling basis.

We also provide ad-hoc surveys for both TfWM and our local authority partners.

This data is not only crucial for understanding trends but is used for baselining various transport models across the region, supplementing our sensor network data.

We are exploring procurement options that could enable us to continue to support the surveys identified above in a cost effective, unbureaucratic way whilst ensuring quality of data that facilitates our automated processing of survey data into our data downloader.

We therefore wish to engage with suppliers, to understand more about what they do and how an agreement could work between the WMCA and a supplier.

Aside from regular Automated Traffic Counts, Manual Traffic Counts and Junction Turning Counts, we are also keen to explore new areas of technology include drone technology to enhance our survey capabilities.

Please note this scope of this procurement does not include 'always-on' sensors (AI, ANPR etc).