Nikola Floodgate has been a highways and transportation professional since 1998 and has more than 20 years’ experience in transport planning and highway engineering.  Her career started in 1998 when she joined the consultancy Peter Brett Associates as a junior technician and gained experience of strategic transport modelling, highway design standards and road safety audits.

Nikola then moved from this consultancy role into a local authority role working for a unitary authority until 2015.  In this time Nikola gained a broad range of experience in all manner of highways and transportation areas, including a solid grounding in traffic engineering and solutions to mitigating road safety or capacity concerns - with a strong focus on project and programme management for the Local Growth Fund programme.

In 2015 Nikola spent a year working for the Department for Communities and Local Government in one of its ‘arm’s length bodies’, the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation. Her role there involved business case development, economic appraisals and project management.  A real success in this time was securing over £11m of Central Government funding to commence the construction of the new Springhead Bridge.

Nikola moved to Kent in 2016 to take up the role of Schemes Planning and Delivery Manager.  In this role Nikola is able to use both her engineering experience and her education background in order to lead the team that seeks to deliver interventions to reduce the number of people killed and seriously injured on Kent’s roads.

Presentation: Securing funding for safety remedial measures on the Major Roads Network
The Road Safety Foundation is working with local authorities to work up proposals for the Safer Roads Fund - including some important strategic work with Kent County Council which involves an iRAP survey of the Major Roads Network (MRN) in Kent.

The MRN is the network of important local authority roads that sit beneath the Strategic Road Network (SRN). The MRN will have greater funding levels provided by Vehicle Excise Duty, though at the moment the emphasis appears to be on these funds being spent on major projects such as bypasses that will support greater economic development.

Risk per km travelled of fatal or serious crashes on the MRN is four times that on the SRN, and through this work with Kent CC, Road Safety Foundation is going to make the case that some of these new funds would be well-spent on safety remedial measures.

By autumn 2019, the first outline investment case for MRN roads in Kent will be available, and this presentation will outline: the scale of investment required; the type of measures that would be successful; the fatal and serious injuries we would expect to prevent over the next 20 years; the benefits of applying the countermeasures in monetary terms; and a programme Benefit Cost Ratio.

Other local authorities are already considering undertaking similar iRAP surveys for MRN roads in their county in preparation for making the business case for investment, and the hope is that this presentation will help others follow suit - and ultimately mean substantial numbers of lives saved and injuries prevented over the next 20 years.