Approaches to Route Planning and Guidance in the United Kingdom

Abstract

When Colin Moynihan, the Government Minister with responsibility for the Ordnance Survey (OS), the national mapping agency for Great Britain, visited the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in central London on 18th January 1989 for the launch of the newly-formed Association for Geographic Information, he arrived by car under the direction of Autoguide, an interactive vehicle navigation system devised by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory (TRRL), a government agency responsible to the Department of Transport. He could well, as the Minister for Sport, have walked the 500m from his office and, in any case, the route was simple and well-known; moreover, Autoguide then existed, and still exists, only as a demonstration system between central London and Heathrow airport. The use of Autoguide was thus very largely a public relations exercise; but it was also symbolic of government interest in the handling of geographic information, since Autoguide had been identified as an example of the use of geographic information in the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Handling of Geographic Information (Department of the Environment 1987). Autoguide itself is also the most specific indication of the Government’s interest in vehicle navigation.