Competition seeks to manage hazards better

10 November 2023

National Highways has launched a new innovation competition offering businesses with new ideas on how to manage hazards across its network up to £90,000 to develop their concepts.

The government-owned company is working with Connected Places Catapult on the Hazard Protection on Roads Accelerator.

The competition is open to small or medium-sized enterprises with less than 250 employees and innovations must fall within one of the following categories:

• Gathering data about hazards on roads – technologies that contribute to identifying and gathering data on hazards such as CCTV data, analytics, satellite and in-car data including GPS and vehicle sensors
• Streamlining hazard responses – helping to respond quickly and accurately to any identified hazard, solutions could include automatically alerting drivers, automated responses and clean-up of hazards and notifying professionals such as traffic officers
• Improving driver notification of hazards – better notification to drivers when a hazard is identified or, for planned roadworks, making sure drivers are aware and know how to safely navigate
• Improving testing of hazard detection technology – this aims to assess the real-world performance of any technology, enabling smoother software updates and also to generate datasets on hazard detection performance
• Influencing drivers to reduce unsafe behaviour – the company wants to identify and accelerate any innovations that could reduce unsafe driving behaviour such as using mobile phones at the wheel.