Much of the strategic road network’s bridge stock was built in a single post-war boom and is now ageing at the same time. Peter Hill sets out how National Highways is planning to keep these structures safe and serviceable for decades to come.

• How the age profile of the network shapes investment and intervention priorities
• Balancing renewal, maintenance and life extension across a large portfolio
• What National Highways needs from the supply chain to deliver its plans

Bridge owners face growing maintenance needs at a time of tight and often uncertain budgets. This keynote maps where bridge funding comes from, how it is allocated and what is likely to change.

• The main funding routes for national, local and rail bridge owners
• How long-term settlements and spending reviews affect bridge programmes
• What owners can do to make a stronger case for investment

The Structures Fund has given local authorities a route to funding for major bridge and structures work. This session shares what strong applications have in common and what the process has revealed about the state of local bridge stock.

• What assessors look for in a successful bid
• Common gaps in evidence, data and business cases
• Practical advice for authorities planning future applications

The I-376 Commercial Street Bridge in Pittsburgh, PA, carries more than 100,000 vehicles daily. To avoid years of traffic impacts from staged construction, PennDOT selected Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) for the replacement. A new Arched Steel Delta Frame bridge weighing over 9,000 tonnes was built adjacent to the existing structure on temporary foundations.

During a 17-day interstate closure in July 2026, the existing bridge was removed using conventional and explosive demolition, and the new bridge was slid 37 meters into place, making it one of the heaviest bridge slides ever executed. This presentation highlights the innovative design and construction strategies that made this landmark interstate bridge replacement possible.

Hydro, developed collaboratively by XEIAD and Strainstall, both part of British Engineering Services (BES), is a plug-and-play remote monitoring system that helps asset owners better understand changing water levels at bridges, culverts, and structures at risk from flooding and scour. This case study explores a live trial of the technology and its potential to support a more proactive approach to scour management.

The presentation will cover:

• How water-level data, supporting imagery, and automated alerts work together to give owners real-time insight into flood and scour conditions
• How remote monitoring gives inspection and operational decisions a stronger evidence base
• Practical lessons learned from the live trial
• How scalable monitoring could enable a data-led approach to scour management across larger asset portfolios

Network Rail manages thousands of bridges over water, where scour can develop unseen below the waterline. Iain Fox explains how computational fluid dynamics and real-time monitoring are giving a much more precise picture of scour risk.

• How CFD modelling improves understanding of flow around piers and abutments
• Real-time monitoring as an early warning during flood events
• How a more precise risk picture supports better targeted intervention

Fore Gill Bridge is a historic masonry highways structure on a critical rural route between Swaledale and Arkengarthdale in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. On New Year’s Eve 2023, prolonged rainfall contributed to the collapse of an approach retaining wall, exposing several undocumented masonry arches that were nearing the end of their maintainable life.

This presentation explores how North Yorkshire Council Engineers responded to the failure and approached the sympathetic replacement of the ageing structure which involved the reconstruction of the traditional unreinforced masonry arch. The case study will examine why a masonry arch was selected over a modern alternative, and how this decision supported material reuse and preserved its historic character. It will also present wider lessons learned for asset owners managing the risks, costs, sustainability and stakeholder challenges associated with ageing infrastructure.

This session tells the story of how National Highways’ structures inspection assurance has grown from a regulatory requirement into a wider journey in asset management and digital maturity. Drawing on years of auditing Principal and General Inspections, the presenters will share what the audits have revealed, how inspection quality has improved, and the lessons other bridge owners can apply to their own inspection regimes.

• The journey so far: how inspection assurance has moved from spreadsheet-led audits to the current S30013 programme and digital audit platforms.
• Why it matters: the role of reliable condition data in structural safety, regulatory assurance, and better asset management and investment decisions.
• What the audits reveal: common issues found in inspection data, and how quality is being improved
• Lessons for other owners: practical takeaways for local authorities and other bridge owners looking to strengthen confidence in their own inspection data.
• A look ahead: a brief view of how AI-enabled auditing, with human oversight and validation, could improve consistency and scale.

A fast-paced session of five-minute talks from bridge owners, contractors, researchers and asset managers. Each speaker shares one practical idea, project or lesson that delegates can take away and apply.

• Five or six short case studies in 30 minutes
• A mix of technology, research and practical asset management
• A chance to hear from smaller organisations and new voices

Capturing accurate data under bridge decks, in confined spaces and below the waterline is difficult where GPS signals are weak or absent. Ben Bishop shows how drone and survey technology can build a reliable digital twin of the whole structure.

• Surveying techniques that work without GPS
• Combining above-water and underwater data in one model
• How accurate digital twins support inspection and maintenance

This session will outline why expansion joints should be considered as part of the complete bridge system rather than as an isolated product. It will also introduce the BJA’s work to raise standards through practical technical guidance, knowledge sharing and stronger collaboration between asset owners, designers, contractors and specialist industry.

Attendees would take away three points:

• Why early specialist engagement and coordinated interfaces matter;
• How better specification, installation, inspection and maintenance can reduce avoidable interventions;
• And how the BJA is bringing industry experience together to support more durable, maintainable and evidence-led outcomes.

The Bridge Inspector Certification Scheme sets a recognised standard for the people who inspect our bridges. Niall McKay gives an update on the scheme and why certification matters to owners and inspectors alike.

• The latest developments in the scheme
• How certification raises inspection quality and consistency
• How inspectors and employers can get involved

National Highways looks after a large estate of bridges and structures left behind by closed railway lines. Fiona Smith explains how these historic assets are managed today and what their condition tells us about long-term durability.

• The challenges of managing structures with no operational railway
• Balancing safety, heritage, community interests and cost
• Lessons that apply to other owners of ageing structures

Timber bridges are attracting renewed interest for their low-carbon credentials, but recent failures show the importance of getting design and maintenance right. This session presents research into recent timber footbridge failures and the lessons owners and designers can learn.

• Common causes of recent timber footbridge failures
• Current design practice for detailing that protects timber from moisture and decay
• Inspection and maintenance priorities for timber structures

The Old Wye Bridge at Chepstow is a Grade I listed cast-iron bridge spanning the River Wye on the border between England and Wales. This session explores how a historic structure shared between two authorities is assessed, maintained and protected for the future.

• Managing a listed structure while keeping it safe and in use
• Working across two authorities and two nations
• Balancing heritage requirements with modern loading and safety needs

Network resilience depends less on the structural strength of individual bridges and more on the consequences of losing them. A modest bridge may sever a strategic route, while closing a major structure may have little impact where alternative routes exist. This presentation outlines a system-level asset criticality framework to support renewal, repair and reconstruction planning across bridge portfolios.

• Consequence-based criticality: criticality is defined by the impact of failure (safety, service continuity, journey reliability, cost, societal, heritage and environmental effects) rather than asset condition. It is then combined with probability of failure in a prioritisation matrix.
• Smarter, risk-informed maintenance: inspection intensity, intervention objectives and resourcing are tailored to system needs. This avoids over-maintaining low-impact assets and focuses effort where failure would be unacceptable.

The closing session of Day 1 draws together the day’s themes and asks what it will really take to extend the life of the UK’s bridges. Speakers will discuss the funding, skills, technology and decisions needed to keep bridges working for longer.

• The biggest barriers to extending bridge life
• Where investment and innovation can make the most difference
• Practical priorities for owners over the next decade

Some of the most exciting advances in bridge engineering didn’t start in bridge engineering. Sensors from offshore energy, data platforms from rail, construction methods from manufacturing, and digital tools from aerospace are reshaping how we design, build, monitor, and maintain structures. This opening session brings together leaders from across infrastructure to explore which technologies are crossing sector boundaries and what it takes to adopt them at scale.

Panellists will discuss:

• Technologies from other industries already transforming bridge design, construction, and asset management
• How bridge innovations, from accelerated construction to remote monitoring, are being applied across wider infrastructure
• The barriers to adoption, including procurement, standards, risk appetite, and skills
• What owners, designers, and contractors need to do now to stay ahead

The Menai Suspension Bridge is a landmark of early engineering and still carries traffic between Anglesey and mainland Wales. This session describes the unexpected structural issues uncovered during its restoration and how the team responded.

• What was found once work began, and why it was not visible before
• Adapting plans while respecting the bridge’s heritage
• Lessons for future work on historic suspension bridges

During WWII, steel tie bars were installed on William Cubitt’s 1840s Foord Road Viaduct to guard against progressive collapse if a bomb destroyed a span. Decades later, corrosion of the bars and supporting metalwork posed a growing public safety risk, but before they could be removed, Bill Harvey Associates, Robert Bird Group, and Accolade Measurement had to answer a deceptively simple question for Southern Renewal Enterprise: do the bars influence how the viaduct behaves?

The presentation will cover:

• The viaduct’s history and the uncertainties in its construction, including original drawings that don’t match reality, the wartime threat that prompted the tie system and service load damage present today.
• Why the bars couldn’t simply be removed: although never intended to carry load, stiff load paths attract it, and their influence on service behaviour under live load mattered more than any effect on ultimate capacity
• A measurement approach using timetabled trains at line speed, with high-frequency, high-resolution laser sensors 20 m up, and custom signal processing to detect sub-millimeter movements hidden in noisy data and against temperature effects
• The before-and-after results from a trial bar removal, which showed a measurable but small change in behaviour, giving justified confidence that removal could proceed

Stone is one of the oldest bridge materials, but it is rarely considered for modern footbridges. This session explores the design and construction of a doubly curved stone footbridge for the Tate, showing how a traditional material can be reimagined to deliver an elegant, low-carbon structure.

The presentation will cover:

• The design concept and why stone was chosen for the footbridge
• The engineering challenges of creating a doubly curved form in stone, from geometry and analysis to detailing
• How the construction approach turned the design into reality
• The carbon benefits of building in stone and lessons for wider use of low-carbon materials in bridge design

Structural health monitoring and digital twins rely on continuous sensor data, but sensor faults and communication outages leave gaps, often when information matters most, such as during floods and earthquakes. Drawing on his I-X Global Early-Career AI Fellowship research at Imperial College London, Dr Shady Adib compares generative AI with conventional techniques for reconstructing missing measurements, and explains how the work is being extended to five years of monitoring data from the Forth Road Bridge.

• How diffusion-based and generative adversarial models compare with linear interpolation and Gaussian Process Regression, tested on shaking-table data from a three-storey timber structure under real earthquake records
• What generative AI can and cannot reliably recover, from short random gaps to prolonged sensor outages
• Applying the approach to the Forth Road Bridge, with uncertainty-aware assessment to support maintenance and decision-making

Much of the talk about AI in engineering is about abstract possibilities, so this panel focuses on what engineers are actually doing with it. Panellists share real results, where AI is helping and where it needs careful handling.

• Practical examples of AI in bridge design, assessment and monitoring
• The risks of inappropriate use and how to keep engineering judgement central
• Skills, cost and environmental questions that come with wider adoption

This session takes stock of how far the bridge community has come in decarbonising its infrastructure, and how far there is still to go. Drawing on the Group’s work, it reflects on what has been learned and sets out where the industry’s focus should turn next.

The presentation will cover:

• Key lessons from the first five years of the Net Zero Bridges Group
• Where good progress is being made in decarbonising bridge infrastructure
• The challenges that still lie ahead
• The opportunities that should take priority over the next five years

For about 20,000 people living in isolated communities on Nkombo Island in Lake Kivu, Rwanda, access to schools, healthcare and markets currently depends on trying to reach the mainland by boat. Nicola Turrini and Fernando Madrazo-Aguirre explain how Cowi and Fika worked together on the feasibility study for a 350+ m long suspension trail bridge to provide safe year-round access to the entire island:

• The engineering challenges of a long span in a remote location
• Designing for local materials, skills and maintenance
• The social and economic impact of improved access

When a bridge is closed, restricted or found to be at risk, how owners communicate can matter as much as the engineering. This session explores how to explain risk and uncertainty clearly to the public, politicians and the media.

• Explaining technical risk in plain language
• Handling public and media pressure during closures and emergencies
• Building trust before problems arise

Does the skills shortage in bridge maintenance run deeper than the visible gaps in headcount? Richard Fish argues that much of the capacity and competence challenges are hidden below the surface, in lost experience, knowledge and judgement.

• The hidden dimensions of the capacity and competence gaps
• Why experience and judgement are hard to replace
• What employers and the sector can do now

The skills gap is widely discussed, but progress on closing it has been slow. This closing debate brings together voices from across the sector to agree practical steps that will make a real difference.

• What is and isn’t working in recruitment, training and retention
• How to attract a more diverse next generation into bridge engineering
• Commitments the industry can make to drive change