Suffolk County Council Speaker Profiles: Graeme Mateer, Richard Webster

We are delighted to have Suffolk County Council supporting our conference on 'The Future of Transport' taking place on 5th and 6th March 2019.

Presentation Title

Graeme Mateer and Richard Webster will be talking about 'Adept Live Labs and Suffolk Challenges', a subject we will pick up in our breakout sessions.

Graeme Mateer
Graeme has extensive experience in transport policy, strategy and delivery with over 14 years at Suffolk County Council, and two years seconded to the Department for Transport.

He is Head of Transport Strategy at Suffolk County Council, responsible for strategy development, delivery of transport schemes, including major infrastructure projects such as the Lake Lothing Third Crossing and Smarter Choices programmes, as well as development management reviewing new development applications.

Graeme is keen to explore how transport needs will adapt and influence smart cities and vice versa.

Richard Webster
Richard Webster has over 26 years of experience within the lighting industry working in both the private and public sectors.

He is the Street Lighting Manager for Suffolk Highways, responsible for the client function, contract management and delivery associated with over 90,000 illuminated assets where 65,000 street lights are connected to a central management system.

Richard has been an early adopter of smart cities technology, utilising the street lighting communications network for a number of projects, and securing subsequent European and DFT/Adept funding to implement innovative technologies on a larger scale.


Synopsis
Suffolk County Council has an excellent record of introducing award-winning innovation to the highways sector – including a traffic signals-based ‘dark fibre’ network and transformative, pioneering street lighting technology.

Early adoption of large-scale, remotely managed node technology has yielded highly effective, energy-efficient light distribution.

Our successful small-scale, rigorous field testing of motion-sensitive adaptive lighting is now set for significant up scaling. This project presents an outstanding opportunity to examine smart technology capability across Suffolk’s urban and rural environment, combined with fully exploring how any authority’s street lighting infrastructure adopts a far broader social function and potentially act as a future income generator.

This project, led by Suffolk Highways with partners including BT, The University of Suffolk, Telensa, CU Phosco, and EnLight, seeks to address many local needs. It is future-proofed to harness technological advancement such as 5G technology and connected autonomous vehicles and is aligned with ‘The Road to Zero’ aspirations of the Government’s Industrial Strategy.