Buro Happold and TRL to focus on improving infrastructure delivery

Engineering consultancy Buro Happold and transport and mobility research specialist TRL have formed a partnership to work with organisations including National Highways and Network Rail to transform transport infrastructure delivery.

They aim to drive improvements in sustainability, resilience and operational efficiency across road and rail networks, including key priorities of addressing the impact of climate change on ageing infrastructure and enabling socio-economic improvements.

An intended key point of difference will be the partnership’s system-led approach, said TRL CEO Paul Campion and Buro Happold UK Development Director for Infrastructure Paula Gough.

Campion said: “TRL started life as a government research laboratory and has a 90 year heritage particularly focused on asset management, and on safety with a strong behavioural element. 

“Buro Happold has much more of a contractor-practitioner-design perspective than we do.”

Gough added that Buro Happold’s experience in rail- and road- adjacent sectors such as city planning would also be a significant factor.

“When you’re thinking about how to make and build and develop good quality cities that are climate resilient and responsive to community needs, you are doing multi-criteria assessment, and we’re used to that complexity,” said Gough.

Campion pointed out that TRL had a partnership with the Alan Turing Institute, the government’s research lab for AI. 

Decarbonisation, delivering economic growth and assisting left-behind communities were going to require transport to deliver in ways it hadn’t done before, he added.