More Than a Job for Lakvinder
	Name: Lakvinder Singh
	Position: Traffic Officer
	Location: Rob Lane outstation, M6

With seven years in a customer-focused environment before becoming a Highways Agency's Traffic Officer Service it's no wonder that Lakvinder Singh loves his job patrolling the motorways of the North West.

Lakvinder - or Lacky as he is known to all his mates at the North West Regional Control Centre near Warrington - is one of 47 on road Traffic Officers based at the Rob Lane outstation next to the RCC just off the M6.

He applied for the job while still at Liverpool John Moore's University where he was finishing a degree in Forensics and Biomolecular Science and with previous call centre experience he was also offered a control room position. His love of driving and the outdoors however meant opting for an on road TO vacancy and he took to the roads in November 2005 just a few weeks after the North West service first went 'live' in Cheshire.

Traffic Officers at Rob Lane cover the centre of the region's motorway network. That means parts of the M60 (Greater Manchester's mega busy ring road), M62, M6 and M57.

Lacky likes to keep busy and his favourite route is the M62 and M57 in Merseyside which Traffic Officers started covering in April 2006.

“It tends to get very busy at around 4.30pm there - once people start heading home in numbers, ” says Lacky. “It's a good job we are around and out to the scene of an incident quickly to help keep the traffic moving if something happens.”

As any Traffic Officer will tell you, there is no typical 'day in the life'. However Lacky's favoured 'lates' shift begins at around 1.45pm with the usual handover briefing and vehicle checks before taking to the road. He and a colleague will usually do a run of their allocated part of the network for the shift before parking up in a handily-placed works unit near Junction 6 of the which gives easy access to the M62 and M57, allowing them to get to an incident quickly.