Region
East Sussex
It probably takes us half the time that it used to to put a draft TRO together. And it shaved hours off the time that it takes us to put a plan pack together for consultations.
John Young, Parking Review Officer, East Sussex County Council
East Sussex – Eastbourne, as shown in Streets Portal
Overview
East Sussex County Council’s parking review team is responsible for managing Traffic Regulation Orders (TROs) across one of the South East’s most diverse counties – covering districts and boroughs from Eastbourne to Rother. With a team of eight officers each working across specific areas, precision, consistency, and speed are essential.
When it came to their map-based TRO workflow, the council was running on a system that was years past its support window. Processes were largely manual, time-consuming, and increasingly at odds with the approaching reality of mandatory digital TROs. The team needed a step change, and they found it in AppyWay’s Traffic Suite.
Watch John's Story
The Challenge: A System Left Behind
The council’s previous TRO software was, in John’s words, “at least six years out of support.” Beyond simply feeling dated, it created a cascade of manual work at every stage of the parking review cycle.
Producing a plan pack for a consultation – a task the team carries out annually across each of their areas – required officers to manually generate every map, hand-apply labels, and build and update a key from scratch. Multiply that across dozens of sites per review, and the hours quickly added up.
Meanwhile, the team was acutely aware that the regulatory landscape was shifting. Digital TROs were coming, and with the county only 50/50 across map-based and written orders, the pressure to modernise was growing. They began looking at what was available — and Traffic Suite stood out immediately.
Why AppyWay?
AppyWay’s Traffic Suite offered something the existing system simply couldn’t: a modern, actively developed platform that was designed for the way councils actually work.
East Sussex had specific requirements, including a county-wide HGV overnight parking ban that didn’t fit neatly into standard templates. AppyWay worked closely with the team during onboarding to make sure those edge cases were properly supported.
”AppyWay stood out as a very modern, simple-to-use system. It was way more modern than what we had previously. And we were aware it was still being actively developed, which was also a bonus - there was more scope to get a bit of input while it was still being developed.
John YoungParking Review Officer, East Sussex County Council
The team was very accommodating and did quite a bit of development work while we were transitioning to make sure those things could be represented on the system. That was really appreciated.
The Results: Half the Time, Better Output
The impact of switching to Traffic Suite was felt almost immediately, and it shows up clearly across every stage of the team’s workflow.
Where the old system required careful, manual point-by-point work, AppyWay made restriction plotting essentially point-and-click. Individual changes that previously took minutes now take seconds. Across a full annual review covering dozens of sites, that difference is transformative.
The cumulative time saving on drafting a complete TRO is significant. John estimates it now takes roughly half the time it used to: a saving that compounds review after review, year after year.
The plan pack process – once one of the team’s most labour-intensive tasks – has been dramatically streamlined. AppyWay automates much of what was previously done manually, from map generation to key creation, with officers able to make tweaks rather than building from scratch.
Beyond the team’s own experience, the move to map-based TROs has made orders significantly easier for the public , and for internal teams – to understand. Resolving a PCN challenge, for example, is far more straightforward when officers can point to a clear digital map rather than trawling through a scanned, potentially handwritten, legacy document.
”Each change on Mapper takes seconds, whereas on the old system, we'd be talking minutes. If you add that up over the course of a review, which can include dozens of sites, that time really starts to add up.
John YoungParking Review Officer, East Sussex County Council
With digital TRO regulation on the horizon, East Sussex is well-positioned. For councils still weighing up the decision, John’s advice is direct: digitising your TROs is a significant project, but with the right partner, the long-term savings in time, accuracy, and public clarity make it unambiguously worthwhile.
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