Road design and engineering

This is a full design and delivery service, including geotechnical engineering, environmental consultancy, site supervision and project management for the entire design process.  

Our teams focus on developing designs which will achieve agreed outcomes and which are likely to be approved for construction. We use visualisation to fully convey proposed schemes, allowing local residents and other stakeholder groups to interact with a scheme and fully understand proposals. 

We also put sustainable outcomes at the heart of our road design and engineering services. This means finding ways to minimise the use of materials designs require and mitigating impacts on the surrounding environment. For example our landscape enhancing scheme on the A30 in Cornwall, UK which took a regenerative approach to restore the ecosystem around the road. 

Learn more

• Bruce Highway Upgrade – Caloundra Road to Sunshine Motorway, Australia
• Samuel De Champlain Bridge, Canada
• A487 New Dyfi Bridge, Wales
• Keyn Glas, A30 Environmental Designated Funds

Our range of services include design assurance, Construction Design Management (CDM) and advice and formal Road Safety Audit procedures. We have the experience of collision investigation and root cause analysis to help project sponsors and design teams to identify road safety hazards and mitigate the attendant risks to road users. 

In 2022-23, we helped National Highways to achieve its “Home Safe and Well” safety pledge, along with our partners Aecom and Road Safety Foundation. We used the iRAP methodology to develop a safety-focused route optimisation approach to deliver safety improvements for sections of the strategic road network (SRN). A pilot on 30km of the A595 identified route issues and assessed the need for interventions, offering multiple scenarios based on the impact on users’ safety and viability. This approach provided National Highways with a highly deliverable package of improvements which will significantly contribute to avoiding deaths or serious injuries across the SRN.

The goal is to provide a common baseline for network-wide improvements and establish consistency of approach within a transport operator or agency.

Arup was actively involved in National Highways’ refresh of their Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB), restructuring and developing a number of their key requirements and advice documents to better reflect the needs of its users and to be more outcome based, less prescriptive and where appropriate reduce the level of advice required. Arup’s responsibilities included rewriting guidance on the geometric design of roundabouts, the geometric design of at-grade priority, grade separated and potentially signal controlled junctions, motorway signalling, inspection and maintenance of traffic signs on motorway and all-purpose trunk roads and driver location signs.

Our circular economy and road pavement design specialists have also been working with Transport Infrastructure Ireland to develop a new design procedure for road design, exploring innovation opportunities and inspired by circular economy principles. The work found that intervening early in the materials design process enabled a significant reduction in carbon impact, construction waste and long-term expense. A case study on 15km of National Road dual carriageway helped to reduce bituminous materials by 8% and reducing embodied carbon emissions by more than 450,000kgCO₂e.

In Australia, we are encouraging the use of recycled materials by developing new reference guides for recycled materials in rail, road and ancillary infrastructure in conjunction with the Victorian Government.