Service overview
Leeds City Councils Highway Design and Construction section (HD&C) provides civil engineering resources to develop and maintain the city’s highway infrastructure. It designs and constructs all the major highway schemes in Leeds.
The service’s activities impact, to some extent, on all aspects of life within the city and are linked to the city council's strategic outcomes. Typical projects include major road schemes, highway works associated with new developments, private street adoption and public realm improvements.
The highway design and construction section is a business orientated service run along consultancy lines. The service is self-financing through income generated through fee earning work.
The section undertakes a full range of duties including:
- Feasibility studies
- Transport and travel assessments
- Highway design
- CDM co-ordinator duties
- Site supervision
- Project management
Vision for the future
The service starts from a strong baseline position. It has a large, experienced workforce that brings a range and depth of skills to all it's projects. The performance of the service has been consistently good, meeting key targets around performance delivery and budget.
The section has recently joined forces with highway design sections from neighbouring local authority districts and now leads the West Yorkshire Highway Design Alliance. The Alliance will provide greater resilience against variations in workload through flexible deployment of resources. It will also enable the section to build on its previous success to ensure it achieves the following:
- A provider of engineering services that is best in class.
- A service that is recognised internally and externally for its success in consistently and efficiently producing high quality work.
- A service that continually seeks and achieves improvement.
- A service that is customer focused, resourceful and adaptable.
- A service which has high calibre staff that develop their potential and enjoy their work.
A key focus for improvement in the service is around client satisfaction. This forms the fundamental element of the performance management system. All teams measure client satisfaction and the service is a member of the national highway design benchmarking club and we are aiming to achieve upper quartile performance against national standards.
Recent successes
Completed high profile projects include:
- Inner Ring Road Stage 7 (Award).
- East Leeds Link.
- City Centre Realm including Albion Place (commended by the Institute of Civil Engineers) and Lands Lane.
- Tommy Wass Junction: Junction improvement incorporating bus lanes and safety measures.
- Commercial Street Rothwell: Town centre public realm improvements.
- Success of Engineering Services staff in all categories of Excellence in Performance Awards.
- Budget target achieved.
Current schemes
These include:
- Horsforth roundabout
- Core Cycle Network
- A65 Kirkstall Road Quality Bus Initiative: £22m scheme to improve bus journey times and to improve pedestrian and cycling facilities.
- A64 Whinmoor: Major new junction to facilitate a new housing development.
- Lower Albion Street: Repaving works for the new Trinity Devlopment.
- New Generation Transport (NGT): this section is providing engineering support to the development of a £250m trolley bus scheme for Leeds.