SAFEWAY2SCHOOL · Integrated system for safe transportation of children to school

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.