Transport for London (TfL) has announced that five new safety innovations are due to be trialed on buses in the UK capital this year as part of the agency’s Bus Safety Innovation Challenge program.
Over the past decade the number of people killed or seriously injured as a result of a collision involving a bus or coach has decreased by 54%, but TfL and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, recognize that much more needs to be done to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries altogether and to achieve the city’s Vision Zero. The Innovation Challenge pairs London’s bus operators with innovative developers to come up with cutting-edge technologies and new solutions to road danger that could complement TfL’s existing Bus Safety Standard. In a previous initiative that was launched in 2017, a £500,000 (US$623,000) innovation fund was split between six projects, including Abellio’s trial of an advanced collision warning system that won Most Innovative Transport Project at the 2019 London Transport Awards.
The five successful applications for the Bus Safety Innovation Challenge fund are:
- Abellio will trial the Datik fatigue monitoring tool that calculates the risk of driver fatigue in real-time;
- Arriva will trial the Humanizing Autonomy vulnerable road user intent prediction software that analyses people walking or cycling near a bus, anticipates their behavior and alerts the driver;
- CT Plus will trial the Lytx Video-based driver safety coaching program that uses clips of actual events so that everyone can learn from them;
- Metroline will trial the JBDL lighting system that illuminates areas of greater risk around buses to other road users, comes on and off automatically in slow-speed circumstances, and that flashes to indicate when a bus is turning;
- Stagecoach will trial Fusion Processing’s pedestrian and cyclist detection and driver alert system that detects vulnerable road users faster than a human can.