Award for Garage Management Project

Bristol City Council won thanks to its use of the technology within the Garage Strategy Team, which has benefited both from lower costs and efficiency improvements since adopting the use of oblique imagery.

The team is assessing the council's 300 garage sites and formulating long-term plans for each of them. The ability to view a site from the desktop has cut the need for five hundred site visits, which has led to considerable savings in both time and money.

Sally Gilbert, Bristol City Council's Garage Strategy Project Manager, says: "We have used it every day, both as an alternative to visiting each location but also as a way of briefing and sharing our information with the stakeholder panel. These are made up of garage tenants, with local councillors and community representatives attending when a site in their area is being reviewed.

"The ability to get a clear perspective from all four points of the compass has proved essential when it comes to surveying the sites properly. Not only can pictometry pick out details not visible from normal overhead images, it also helps identify information not easily seen from the ground, such as encroachments, or where a site is very overgrown."

Pictometry is now being used across the council by surveyors assessing the condition of tower block roofing, to assist the Parks and Green Spaces Strategy and for asset management.