ITS (UK) marks International Women in Engineering Day with inspirational webinar

Paul Hutton June 27, 2020 2 min read 0

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The Women in ITS Forum of ITS (UK) came together to deliver a series of presentations and a discussion about the contribution women have made to mobility in the country.

As well as being a celebration of the steps women taken in the industry, it also looked at how to improve things in the future and had practical experience of projects delivered.

Natalie Sauber of Arcadis gave an insight into the impact of Covid-19 on future mobility, suggesting it introduces the era of green transport, micro-mobility and working from home as the norm.

“I’m really hoping that we’re not going to go back to the same old normal as we were before,” she said.  “As we move out of lockdown cities must prepare to support social distancing on streets and reduce capacity on public transport, but they must also assess if there’s enough active transport infrastructure to support the increasing demand for walking and cycling. We’re already working on that in the background. But COVID-19 is really sort of like accelerated that shift quite significantly.”

Highways England SE Operations Manager Kristy gosling gave a personal account of working on the frontline.  “The change in our environment in the last sort of 12 weeks has been immense,” she said.  “As COVID hit, the traffic flows reduced by about 80 per cent, and you would think that would reduce incidents, but actually [they were] still quite high because the lack of road users meant that the people that were on the roads were generally traveling a lot faster. So that meant that any incident that we had did tend to be a lot more severe than then potentially it could have been.”

The session also included an international panel discussing their experiences in the world of ITS across the globe with Maarja Rannama from Estonia, Jenneke van der Zee of Canada, Garima Singh in India, former ITS (UK) Chair Sharon Kindleysides and Laura Eiro of Finland who made the telling point regarding remote, home working that, “Innovation needs physical proximity”.

The whole event is available here: