Enhancement of school transportation safety by using innovative integrated technologies: the "Safeway2School" Project

The school transportation issue hides lots of dangers. Between 1994 and 2001, in Sweden 361 children were injured or killed during transportation to and from their school, whereas 455 were killed or injured in Austria only in 2007 and 97 were killed in 2005 in Italy. 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 to and from school are far from negligible and require further efforts to be drastically reduced. SAFEWAY2SCHOOL project scope is to design, develop, integrate and evaluate technologies for providing a holistic and safe transportation service for children, from their door to the school door and vice versa, encompassing tools, services and training for all key actors in the chain. The SAFEWAY2SCHOOL project promotes a holistic approach, to assure safe and secure transportation for the children, to and from school through integration of various technologies and systems. The SAFEWAY2SCHOOL integrated system will be comprised of the following parts: a) Routing and re-routing application, including real time rerouting; b) Surrounding traffic information while en route and while children embark and disembark from the school bus; c) Intelligent Speed Adaptation system; d) Safety belt checker; e) Intelligent bus stop; f) Family notification system; g) VRU notification system; h) Training modules for all stakeholders; and, i) Inventory tool for classification of the bus stops. The current paper provides an overview of the SAFEWAY2SCHOOL integrated system as this has been extrapolated from the initial research in the user needs and the accident analysis and has been outlined through the project's Use Cases. Also, the methodological approach, that was followed in order to extract the Use Cases, is being introduced. Finally, the basic results derived from accident data analysis, as well as the final Use Cases, are illustrated.