Road Signs and Markings

Mr. Greg Knight
To ask the Minister of State, Department for Transport when blue driver location signs were introduced by his Department; how many have been installed on the road network to date; and at what cost to the public purse.

Chris Mole
For more than 30 years, distance marker posts have been provided at 100 metre intervals along each hard shoulder of motorways. Marker posts enable maintenance contractors to identify exactly where repair works are needed. They also show the direction to the nearest motorway emergency phone.

Driver Location Signs were introduced in 2003 and approximately 16,000 signs have been installed on 80 per cent. of the motorway network at a cost of £5.9 million. During 2009-10 signs are being installed on the remaining parts of the Motorway Network at an additional cost of £1.6 million.

Driver Location Signs are more visible to the travelling public and this enables:

Motorists to quickly identify their location.

Emergency Services to get to incident scenes more quickly due to them receiving more accurate incident location information.

Research carried out on trial sections showed that response times of emergency service organisations were 10 per cent. quicker than previous responses to similar incidents. Getting the emergency services to the scene of an incident more efficiently ultimately leads to incidents being cleared more quickly.