SAFEWAY2SCHOOL

Integrated system for safe transportation of children to school

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'Between 1994 and 2001, 361 children were injured or killed during transportation to/from their school in Sweden, whereas 455 were killed or injured in Austria only in 2007 and 97 were killed in Italy in 2005. In a single school bus accident in Greece in 2003, 20 children lost their lives. Different as the above numbers may be, they all tell us one thing: Crashes involving school buses and crashes involving children traveling from/to school, are far from negligible and require further efforts to be drastically reduced.

SAFEWAY2SCHOOL aims to design, develop, integrate and evaluate technologies for providing a holistic and safe transportation service for children, from their home door to the school door and vice versa, encompassing tools, services and training for all key actors in the relevant transportation chain. These include optimal route planning and rerouting for school buses to maximize safety, on-board safety applications (i.e. for speed control and seat belts), “intelligent” bus stops, effective warning and information systems for bus drivers, children, parents and the surrounding traffic; as well as training schemes for all actors. The project innovative systems, services and training schemes will be tested in 4 sites Europewide, including North (Sweden), Central (Austria), South (Italy) and Eastern (Poland) Europe; to evaluate their usability, efficiency, user acceptance and market viability; taking into account the very different children’s transportation to/from school systems across the different European regions as well as key cultural and socio-economic aspects.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

Concerted efforts are needed to reduce yearly fatalities from school bus crashes. An EU-funded project is contributing to this cause, reaching out to all key actors in the transportation chain.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Members of the 'Integrated system for safe transportation of children to school' (SAFEWAY2SCHOOL) project took into account the varied forms of transportation to and from different school systems across Europe, as well as important cultural and socioeconomic aspects. Their aim was to design, develop, evaluate and integrate technologies for more comprehensive and safe transportation services for children. This entailed evolving a door-to-door perspective, with tools, services and training targeting all involved.

Employing a user-oriented approach, the project partners sought to relate user needs to the system being developed, and then define system requirements accordingly. The requirements were grouped into functional blocks covering safe route planning, information and warning, bus driver information and notification, and training and education. Other considerations included rerouting school buses, on-board safety applications (e.g. seat belts) and intelligent bus stops.

The resulting system architecture produced hardware and software tools for, among others, localisation, route planning, navigation, communication between vehicles and road, a vehicle-based system supporting bus drivers, a vulnerable road users (VRU) unit, and training schemes. All tools, technology and software were evaluated considering technical, security and user-oriented points of view.

Evaluated at five pilot sites in Austria, Poland and Sweden, with a simulator experiment carried out in Germany, system results were positive, indicating cost-effective solutions and a high acceptance for the overall approach.

SAFEWAY2SCHOOL's holistic approach to safer transportation of Europe's school-going children has provided a solid foundation on which to continue future work in relation to standardisations and policy. Project work offers benefits all round: for children, parents, teachers, bus drivers and all on-road transport users.