Built to Last Beyond Opening Day: Pell Frischmann on Designing Scotland’s Roads and Active Travel for the Whole Lifecycle
- Pell Frischmann is celebrating its centenary in 2026. Why is it so important to design active travel schemes for their whole asset lifecycle rather than just opening day, and what happens when schemes are designed without local authority revenue budgets in mind?
Reaching our centenary year in 2026 naturally prompts reflection on the value of long-term thinking in delivery. It is completely understandable to get caught up in the momentum of delivering immediate improvements and celebrating opening day, but the genuine test of any scheme is how well it performs five or ten years down the line. Capital grants might fund initial construction, but local authority revenue budgets are under severe, well-documented pressure just maintaining existing statutory services.
When schemes are designed without ongoing maintenance, supply chain realities, and real-world user behaviour in mind, issues emerge quickly on the ground. A key industry-wide challenge across Scotland is ensuring that design aspirations align with real-world material availability. For instance, while accessibility guidance rightly prioritises gentle gradients at dropped crossings, standardising those transition details so that appropriate kerb units are commercially available and straightforward for contractors to source remains an industry hurdle. Without close coordination between designers and suppliers, you risk awkward on-site adjustments that compromise level surfaces for wheelchair users and visually impaired pedestrians.
The same principle applies to how different users interact on the street. In our recent Bus Stop Bypass Conflict Study for Glasgow City Council, we analysed various floating bus stop layouts such as Byres Road, Garscube Road, and Langside Road to examine real-world interactions between cyclists, bus passengers, and pedestrians. What the evidence shows is that long-term success comes down to practical detailing: the width of the boarding island, shelter orientation to prevent waiting passengers stepping into cycle tracks, clear crossing priority markings, and designing for the speed of modern e-bikes and cargo deliveries.
If bespoke components are specified without considering long-term replacement supply, or if physical geometry is squeezed into an unsuitable streetscape without understanding user flows, local authorities face real operational headaches. Designers have a responsibility to support councils by creating schemes that are practical to look after and intuitive to use. If an asset cannot be maintained efficiently or creates continuous friction between users, it gradually deteriorates, loses community support, and stops performing as intended.
- You focus on durable material choices, buildability, winter maintenance access and robust drainage details. Can you give some practical examples of design decisions that stop active travel infrastructure becoming an unmanageable maintenance liability after a couple of Scottish winters?
It really comes down to sensible, practical engineering details rather than overcomplicating things. Geometry is a fundamental starting point. We aim for a clear 2.5 to 3.0 metres wherever possible and ensure lighting columns, signage, and bollards are positioned outside the main running width. That guarantees that when maintenance, inspection, or sweeping vehicles need to access the route, they can do so cleanly without clipping street furniture, breaking kerbs, or churning up soft verges.
Drainage design is equally critical in the Scottish climate. Freeze-thaw cycles degrade surfaces rapidly wherever water is allowed to sit. We design with positive crossfalls, shallow grass swales, and well-placed gullies so surface water clears quickly, preventing ponding, reducing the risk of sheet ice forming, and avoiding edge scour.
Sub-base design is another vital factor. When building across poor ground, soft clays, or saturated peat, ensuring adequate sub-base depth and incorporating appropriate geotextile membranes prevents early rutting and surface failure under maintenance loads. At the same time, we focus on specifying durable, approved materials that can be easily matched and reinstated during routine utility works, avoiding awkward patch repairs that undermine the route's integrity.
- Your work spans some very different environments, from the remote, harsh coastal conditions of Iochdar in the Western Isles, to rural community road safety in Culbokie, to the Muir Wood Path connecting communities in suburban Edinburgh. What were the biggest physical and geographic challenges on these schemes, and how did you overcome them?
Every scheme throws up completely different constraints to work within, and you cannot simply replicate the same approach across Scotland. Out at Slighe an Iochdair in South Uist, we were introducing an active travel route alongside a narrow, single-track spine road in the Outer Hebrides. You have to deal with gale-force coastal winds, fragile machair soils, and virtually no spare road envelope. Standard urban materials would weather quickly and look out of place, so we used durable, locally appropriate solutions including recycled plastic edging suited to the harsh marine air and designed intuitive passing and walking spaces that respected the sensitive landscape.
Up in Culbokie on the Black Isle, the challenge was calming traffic through a rural community without imposing a heavy urban look. Vehicle speeds within the village were high and road widths tight. Rather than installing chicanes, we used context-sensitive measures: tightening crossing sightlines, introducing subtle traffic calming, and linking up footways so walking to the primary school felt safe and natural.
With the Muir Wood Path in Currie, it was about transforming an informal, but well-used ‘muddy path’ into an all-weather surface for year-round use without the need to navigate mud and puddles. Working within a tight alignment bounded by agricultural land, mature trees, and nearby overhead power infrastructure, we balanced these physical constraints to deliver a new shared-use path that is enjoyed by walkers, wheelers, and cyclists alike.
- Your colleague Mansi Desai will be highlighting practical carbon assessment methods. How does Pell Frischmann quantify, report and reduce both embodied and operational carbon? And how can councils align their road and active travel schemes with net zero targets and PAS 2080 without sacrificing structural resilience?
For us, carbon management starts at the point where you can still influence the outcome, not once the design is already fixed. Our sustainability team, led by Dr Mansi Desai, work alongside our highways engineers to bring carbon assessment directly into optioneering and design decisions, through our Carbon Management Process and practical tools such as the Carbon Hierarchy Lens (CHL), developed through our work on the ADEPT Live Labs 2 programme.
We quantify carbon on a whole-life basis, considering the materials and construction required to deliver a scheme, future maintenance and operation and, where relevant, the carbon implications of how the wider transport network operates. Mansi and her team help project teams establish carbon baselines, identify carbon hotspots, compare options and track reductions as designs develop. This is where PAS 2080 is particularly important. It is about embedding carbon management throughout infrastructure decision-making, rather than simply producing a carbon calculation at the end. PF's own PAS 2080 material similarly describes the standard as a framework for managing carbon across the infrastructure lifecycle and value chain.
For councils, the Carbon Hierarchy provides a practical starting point: first ask what can be avoided, then what can be reduced, and then where materials and solutions can be optimised. That might mean retaining a sound existing pavement or foundation rather than reconstructing it, reducing the amount of new material required, or considering lower-carbon materials such as warm-mix asphalt and recycled aggregates where technically appropriate.
Our Sustainability team have put this thinking into practice through our work with Liverpool City Council on ADEPT Live Labs 2. PF led the development of the Carbon Hierarchy approach and implemented it on live projects, developing a practical toolkit that enables the Council to consider whole-life carbon and cost together within highway design and maintenance decisions.
Crucially, reducing carbon should not mean reducing resilience. The right solution balances upfront carbon with structural performance, climate resilience, drainage, maintenance requirements and asset life. A solution that uses less material initially but requires more frequent maintenance or replacement can simply shift carbon into the future. That whole-life perspective is central to the approach our team bring to schemes, helping councils translate net zero ambitions and PAS 2080 principles into practical engineering decisions.
- You’ve been involved in developing The Highland Council’s Local Transport Strategy and the HITRANSformers study, which assesses the cumulative impact of major renewable energy developments on the transport network across Highland. What have these projects taught you about protecting whole networks rather than focusing on individual schemes?
The clearest takeaway is that the varied demographics and geography of Highland mean the transport network functions as an interconnected regional web serving multiple distinct needs that must be considered collectively.
When you have a substantial influx of renewable energy developments, including major electricity transmission upgrades, alongside established industries like timber haulage, heavy vehicle movements concentrate heavily on specific corridors often rural single carriageways. If you only assess planning applications on an individual or localised basis, you can miss the cumulative impact on bridges, culverts, passing places, and road foundations over time.
At the same time, those same routes can be vital lifelines for local residents, delivery drivers, school transport, and tourists. You cannot simply restrict local access to accommodate abnormal loads. Our work developing The Highland Local Transport Strategy provides the policy framework and delivery plan to address these competing demands, while our work like the HITRANSformers study puts that policy into action by taking a regional view. By mapping out where capacity bottlenecks, structural pinch-points, and freight movements overlap, we provide regional transport partnerships and councils with the evidence needed to plan interventions collaboratively, coordinate abnormal load movements, and ensure developers contribute fairly and transparently to network upkeep.
- You’re also currently redefining bus stop assets across the Highlands, from Inverness to Caithness. What does it take to make roadside passenger infrastructure truly resilient, maintainable and future proof in such a large and varied region?
Delivering roadside passenger infrastructure across the Highlands means designing around real-world maintenance logistics and demanding environmental conditions. Through our current work supporting The Highland Council on their Bus Infrastructure Network Masterplan, we are helping the Council explore a more consistent, network-wide approach to forward investment.
In a region this extensive, resilience comes down to three practical considerations: First, exploring a proportionate, tiered hierarchy. A busy interchange in Inverness requires a very different set of facilities compared to an interurban corridor or a rural passing place. Developing a structured framework helps define baseline levels of provision across diverse settings from city hubs to rural settlement stops and scenic visitor points ensuring resources are targeted where they provide the greatest passenger benefit.
Second, keeping long-term maintenance practical. In exposed coastal and rural locations, salt spray and driving weather will rapidly degrade lightweight infrastructure. We focus on durable, corrosion-resistant materials and off-grid innovations like solar-powered illumination, which provides safe lighting without incurring heavy utility grid connection and energy overheads. Promoting a standardised catalogue of parts also means local area depots can carry common components, speeding up repairs after weather damage or vandalism.
Finally, supporting transparent decision-making. Local authorities regularly receive requests for new stops or upgrades. Developing an objective prioritisation tool and a structured project pipeline gives officers a consistent, evidence-based method to evaluate community requests, support committee discussions, and draw down shelf-ready schemes when national grant opportunities arise.
- What will visitors see when they visit Pell Frischmann at Road Expo Scotland, and what conversations are you hoping to have with local authorities, contractors and other industry partners?
Visitors to our stand will have the opportunity to speak directly with our Scottish transport planning and engineering teams about the real-world network challenges they are managing every day.
One of our real strengths is that we combine deep local understanding with the reach of a national consultancy. We work right across the country, and that breadth of experience is highly transferable. It means we can bring the best ideas, data-led toolkits, and lessons learned from major projects elsewhere in the UK, but test and adapt them through a Scottish lens rather than assuming that one solution fits everywhere.
We are looking forward to catching up with local authority officers, regional transport partnerships, and industry contractors to discuss:
- Maximising efficiency, safety, and capacity from aging road assets when budgets are under pressure.
- Evidence-based active travel and corridor design including balancing bus passenger accessibility and cyclist safety at bypass stops.
- Designing schemes that are practical to maintain over their full lifecycle and avoid becoming revenue burdens.
- Embedding decarbonisation, whole-life carbon tracking, and climate resilience into everyday highways practice.
- How public sector bodies can utilise our multi-lot appointment on the Scotland Excel Engineering and Technical Consultancy Framework to access our multi-disciplinary expertise quickly and compliantly.
Catch Pell Frischmann on Stand C45.