Skip to main content

London buses to trial speed safety technology

New technology that is designed to reduce speeds and increase vehicle safety will be trialled on London’s buses next month, as part of the Mayor and Transport for London’s (TfL) continuing work to halve the number of people killed or seriously injured on London’s roads. The Mayor and TfL announced today that intelligent speed adaptation (ISA), an innovative technology that ensures vehicles can’t exceed speed limits, will be trialled on 47 London buses in a UK-first. The new technology, which was outli
June 26, 2015 Read time: 2 mins
London bus speed technology trial - photo courtesy of TfL
New technology that is designed to reduce speeds and increase vehicle safety will be trialled on London’s buses next month, as part of the Mayor and 1466 Transport for London’s (TfL) continuing work to halve the number of people killed or seriously injured on London’s roads.

The Mayor and TfL announced today that intelligent speed adaptation (ISA), an innovative technology that ensures vehicles can’t exceed speed limits, will be trialled on 47 London buses in a UK-first.

The new technology, which was outlined in London’s first Pedestrian Safety Action Plan last year, recognises speed limits on the route using TfL’s digital speed limit map of London, and ensures that the bus is not able to go any faster.

The trials will take place on two routes in the city, which include a variety of different road environments, with differing speed limits, allowing the new technology to be fully tested.

This will enable TfL to understand the effectiveness of ISA in promoting speed compliance across the road network and improving safety. The trials, which run until autumn, will also seek to understand the attitudes of drivers and passengers to the technology. If successful, ISA could be introduced across London’s 8,700 bus fleet.

The data informing the ISA trials will come from TfL’s digital speed limit map of London, which was re-launched last year to help spur the development of the next generation of in-vehicle technologies and mobile phone apps for the road. Making such information openly and freely available, and keeping it accurate, means existing services such as sat-navs and GPS can provide drivers with the correct information on the speed limit of the roads they are travelling on. This will give road users greater certainty and help to improve road safety.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Foundation funds research for informed campaigning
    April 29, 2015
    ITS International talks to Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the transport research and lobbying organisation, the RAC Foundation. It is through the eyes of an economist that Professor Stephen Glaister, emeritus professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College London and director of the RAC Foundation, views current and future transport problems. Having spent 30 years at the London School of Economics and another 10 at Imperial, the move to the RAC Foundation was a radical departure from
  • A carbon free and accident free Europe by 2015?
    February 2, 2012
    By 2050, the Europe Commission aims to make transport in Europe carbon- and accident-free. Between now and then, however, a significant technological development and deployment effort is needed. Here, Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, talks about what's being done. In many respects, COOPERS, CVIS and SAFESPOT, set up by the European Commission (EC) to explore the potential of cooperative infrastructure systems, are already legacy projects. Between them, the three devel
  • Detroit testing for Mobileye AVs
    September 15, 2022
    All-electric AV using both Lidar and radar will be on roads with safety driver in Michigan
  • Counting the environmental costs of ITS deployment
    October 29, 2015
    David Crawford looks at the latest thinking about calculating the benefits associated with the environmental side of ITS schemes. The penny is dropping that some environmental costs “are being shifted outside the traditional bounds of evaluation methods” for ITS-based road transport projects, according to researchers at the UK University of Leeds’ Institute for Transport Studies.