The £30 million ADEPT Live Labs 2: Decarbonising Local Roads programme is celebrating its first year of success for the local authority directors group.
The programme was designed to tackle decarbonisation across local highways, and the three-year, UK-wide programme was funded by the Department for Transport and developed by the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport (ADEPT).
As with Live Labs 1, the focus of the scheme is on scalability, applicability and the effective use of resources, but equally invaluable is the emphasis on sharing knowledge. Understanding what hasn’t worked and why is as important to the programme as the successful implementation.
It consists of seven projects are working to four inter-connected themes across the UK:
- A UK centre of excellence for materials – North Lanarkshire Council and Transport for West Midlands.
- Corridor and place-based decarbonisation – Wessex partnership (Somerset County Council, Cornwall Council and Hampshire County Council), Devon County Council, and Liverpool City Council.
- A green carbon laboratory – South Gloucestershire Council & West Sussex County Council.
- A future lighting testbed – East Riding of Yorkshire Council.
ADEPT represents local authority, county, unitary and metropolitan directors of place with the Live Labs initiatives part of its SMART Places programme to support the use of innovation and technology in place-based services.
Live Labs 2 will be celebrated at a live event in Birmingham on 17 April.
Anthony Payne, President of ADEPT said: “ADEPT’s Live Labs programmes are designed to be open source – sharing knowledge, learning and insight with local highways authorities, the wider sector and beyond.
“Live Labs 2’ focus on decarbonisation goes beyond the usual focus on electric vehicles and active travel, to address the much harder, but critical areas of highways infrastructure, construction, assets and maintenance from design to end of life.
“Live Labs 2 Expo 24 is an important opportunity to learn about the development of each project so far and discover the innovations and materials we need to deploy.”
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