The Highway Man:
All of the maintenance depots on my patch have them. From them being requested, they can be on scene within 30 minutes. I’m not sure what the deploy times are like in other areas.
In my patch its a bit longer to be honest due to the contractor messing about. I normally request it, find out where it is and get it escorted to the scene through the traffic. One of the limitations is getting it there. If it needs to come through gridlocked traffic it will be delayed.
Time to put it up is less than 15 minutes for 2 people for one trailer. If its a big scene we may use more than one trailer. Cost of them, so ive been told, was £14000 each, cheap in my opinion.
If its a fatal or life changing injury RTC it will normally take at least 6 hours to clear as a minimum so i would use it then. I work on anything over a couple of hours due to the short time it takes to put into use, subject to its limitations of weather wind etc.
The comment about lights. In Holland and a lot of Europe, i know about Holland due to working with them, as a new vehicle arrives at a scene he turns his light on and turns off the ones on the vehicle in front so theres only ever one lot of lights on for parked vehicles. Other rules apply for moving vehicles but the stopped ones only ever show one lot of lights. No suggestions yet of it happening here though.
Mick