Changes in the maintenance of COBA and QUADRO programs from April 1 2013

Date: 18/3/2013

In December 2012 the Department for Transport (DfT) published plans for the future of in-house programs COBA, QUADRO and INCA. They confirmed that QUADRO and INCA will not be supported by the central Department or their contractors from 31 March 2013. Any QUADRO users who purchased a licence since April 2012 should already have paid a reduced licence fee on the understanding that the period of support might be reduced.

The DfT had received a number of responses from users who were concerned about how accident benefits would be calculated in the absence of COBA. Having carefully considered the business case, they intend to prepare a new, simpler, accident benefit calculation tool which will be released free of charge on the DfT website and maintained in-house.

The DfT, through TRL, will continue providing user support for COBA until 31 March 2013, and intends to continue support until the new tool is available. Users should note, however, that the DfT will not update COBA in line with any WebTAG changes to accident valuations in 2013. Development of the new accident package by the DfT is underway and they hope to release it for beta testing in Spring 2013.

In the light of these changes the Highways Agency (HA) has decided to take over responsibility for COBA, QUADRO and INCA. This responsibility will be transferred to the HA as of 1st April 2013 following the DfT’s decision to rely on TUBA for economic assessment in conjunction with the development of separate software for assessing accident impacts.

In view of the forthcoming new accident assessment tool being developed by the DfT, there will no longer be a need to maintain COBA for purposes of assessing the accident impacts of major road schemes. Nevertheless, COBA remains a useful tool for undertaking accident and transport economic efficiency assessments of smaller HA schemes (LNMS) where a fixed matrix assessment is being undertaken. It has been decided therefore that it would be worthwhile for the HA to continue to fund the maintenance and support of COBA. In relation to QUADRO, this is used for assessing the impacts of maintenance schemes, as well as the roadworks associated with major improvement schemes. As such, it is arguably more relevant to the HA than to WebTAG. Furthermore, since QUADRO is the stable mate of COBA, it was considered altogether more appropriate to transfer responsibility for it to the HA.

TRL has been awarded the contract for the maintenance of COBA and QUADRO as of April 1st 2013 for two years. The change of ownership will also come with some changes to the way that TRL provides assistance to users of these programs.

1) Both programs will be subject to an annual updating during the summer when all changes to parameters based on WebTag and other DfT advice will be programmed. It is unlikely that any other updates will be produced. Changes discovered through queries during the year will, unless the impact is significant, be held over to the annual updating.

2) Both manuals will be brought up to date this summer and the wording in the COBA manual changed to reflect its change of status and the types of schemes that it will be the prime appraisal tool for.

3) Annual maintenance fees of £500 per annum will be put in place again. Only those users who have paid the maintenance fees will be able to receive the annual updates and receive customer support. However, until the new DfT accident analysis program is officially released, users of COBA will be given customer support if they had paid maintenance fees for COBA during the financial year 2012/2013.They will, however, need to pay the annual maintenance fee in 2013/2014 to obtain an updated version of COBA.

4) There will be changes to the way that TRL provides the software. By April 30th 2013, the TRL software website (www.trlsoftware.co.uk) will be the only way to download these two programs and the DfT website will no longer host the COBA and QUADRO programs.

Any queries please contact the TRL software support team (software@trl.co.uk). 

Paul Emmerson:  TRL Product Manager for COBA and QUADRO 

Issued by TRL's Communication Team

Contact Mary Treen / Sarah Bailey

Tel: +44 (0)1344 770514/0141

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