In this blog:
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What is D-TRO?
- D-TRO timeline
- What happens now?
- How Causeway supports D-TRO readiness
- The future
What is D-TRO
D-TRO is short for Digital Traffic Regulation Order. Modern vehicles and their drivers are increasingly reliant on having good information on which to base their driving decisions and interventions. A digitally accessible version of the ‘rules of the road’ is clearly needed by autonomous vehicles, but human drivers also benefit too from not having to see, interpret and remember every traffic sign they pass.
A particularly important case is for speed limits. With most new vehicles purchased having an EU-mandated excessive speed reminder (recently announced to become compulsory in UK too), the car needs accurate information to rely upon, otherwise this safety aid will lose credibility and be frequently switched off.
Each top-tier local authority can make traffic orders, for example to restrict speeds, provide priority measures, make one-way streets and regulate waiting and loading at the kerbside. These TRAs, as Department for Transport (DfT) calls them, between them make hundreds of thousands of TROs each year for both permanent changes and for temporary situations such as roadworks. They mainly use computer systems for this, the most popular being CausewayOne Network and ParkMap, which include the ability to share the information online. But until now, there has been no central repository for the whole country.
This is where D-TRO comes in: the idea of a central database managed by DfT containing a summary of all traffic regulation orders in England: permanent, temporary and experimental. The legal processes remain unchanged, so the definitive reference will still be the full signed or sealed document held by each TRA and hopefully accessible on its website. When fully populated, D-TRO aims to provide a sufficiently detailed summary for most of the use cases identified for those consuming the data, mostly for in-vehicle systems.
D-TRO doesn’t provide any user interface or visualisation. It's just a repository available through APIs that anyone can access using software they have written or procured. These will include providers of sat-navs, vehicle routing applications, and in-vehicle systems, which can then use or display the information however they wish. The intention is to supplement the sometimes fragmented information from individual TRAs with one authoritative source.
D-TRO timeline
What is now D-TRO was first considered in 2017 in a series of meetings between GeoPlace, British Parking Association and Buchanan Computing (now Causeway Technologies). Buchanan Computing was providing its expertise as the original instigator of digitised traffic orders in 1990s with its ParkMap system. DfT took over D TRO in 2019. A private beta test started in October 2024 and became available to everyone a year later. It now has around 130,000 orders published from 200 TRAs and there are over 250 data consumers.
What happens now?
For D-TRO to become mandatory, the Automated Vehicles Act provides that a Statutory Instrument is needed. A draft of this was consulted on in February 2025, but DfT is being tight lipped about the progress of the final instrument. It may appear in the autumn or perhaps not until spring 2027. Once published, it is expected that that will be a period of about 3 months before TRAs are required to comply. At this stage, only new and changed TROs will need to be uploaded. Any historic ones can remain until a further SI comes out, but many of these will be picked up in the meantime as consolidations of orders are carried out.
But authorities should not be complacent and need to prepare now. Authorities need to review their current systems and data for both permanent and temporary orders. Things to check include:
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Is your permanent traffic orders data correct and up to date?
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Are your permanent orders consistent and well organised or do they need checking and consolidating?
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Do you have moving orders recorded (not just kerbside)?
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Are all temporary orders recorded in your system, or are some processed manually?
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Will you need any financial help with this (DfT has hinted that this may be a possibility)?
DfT terms the companies like Causeway proving software that connects to D-TRO as Digital Service Providers (DSP). Have discussions with them to check that they can meet all the requirements and run through the above points with them.
How Causeway supports D-TRO readiness
Involved in digital traffic orders since the early days of GIS, well before D-TRO was thought of, Causeway provides software that has been D-TRO compliant right from its infancy. ParkMap is the source of the majority of permanent orders on D TRO, and CausewayOne Network the source of most of the temporary ones. Causeway offers training and consultancy that reflects its long-term expertise in this area and uniquely offers integrated sign and marking design (SignPlot, Causeway Sign, Causeway Line).
The future
Whilst D-TRO was specified for England and only for regulatory measures, it is already being expanded into the vital area of height restrictions, to help reduce the appalling incidence of around 1,600 ‘bridge bashing’ incidents per year in Britain. Causeway is working with Oxfordshire and DfT on a pilot project to capture and upload this data. Authorities in Wales and Scotland see benefits in ensuring that their data and systems are D-TRO ready, as there are signs of interest from these jurisdictions.
Find out how ready your authority is with a 30-minute D-TRO readiness review.
Get in touch with us at marketing@causeway.com to schedule a review to assess your current data state, recommend which Causeway solution fits your workflow, and outline what compliance actually takes for your authority.
