The work between policy and practice
Road safety progress depends on more than commitments. It requires sustained action, strong partnerships, and accountability to ensure that policies…
Read more
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.
