Department for Transport UK

Smart motorways are not always as safe - or safer - than conventional motorways, the UK government has acknowledged.

UK national standards body BSI has set out minimum requirements for managing safety during connected and autonomous vehicle (C/AV) trials. 

The UK Department for Transport (DfT) has launched a campaign to make transport more inclusive for disabled passengers. 

The UK’s Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) says that future road safety will require innovation rather than repeating past measures. Speaking at the UK Department for Transport (DfT)’s International Road Safety Conference, TRL’s academy director Richard Cuerden discussed why a paradigm shift is needed in the transport sector’s approach to road safety interventions to ensure road casualties are reduced significantly by 2030. The number of deaths on the world’s roads remains unacceptably high, with an e

The UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) has awarded £2 million to develop a national health-check of road markings. The DfT is to analyse nearly 10,000 miles of road with the Local Council Roads Innovation Group (LCRIG) to understand where investment is needed. The council will use Gaist’s machine learning artificial intelligence technology to review close to 150 million high definition images. Stu McInroy, chief executive of the Road Safety Markings Association, believes the study will provide “ha

The Department for Transport (DfT) in the UK is to carry out a review into road policing and traffic enforcement in a bid to improve highway safety. The two-year review - jointly funded by the DfT and Highways England - will look at how road policing currently works, its effectiveness and areas for improvement. The DfT will work with the Home Office and the National Police Chiefs’ Council. A pilot programme is expected to follow in 2020, looking at new initiatives to see what works best for reducing roa

Darren Capes, DfT ITS lead, said projects are working on the business case to understand the benefits of C/AV technologies and what the issues may be. He was speaking at the ITS (UK) Connected Vehicle Forum in Birmingham, where Zenzic - an organisation created by the UK government to accelerate self-driving technology - explained its roadmap to 2030 implementation, summarising co-ordination efforts and project management. If efforts are not coordinated, it may take another 50 years for the technolog

The UK government has wasted hundreds of millions of pounds painting white lines on busy roads to use as cycle lanes, says former Olympic cyclist Chris Boardman. Boardman, cycling and walking commissioner for Greater Manchester, has reportedly joined fellow commissioners Dame Sarah Storey (Sheffield City region) and Will Norman (London) in writing to transport secretary Chris Grayling calling for new measures to be adopted. The Guardian says the letter argues that painted cycle lanes do not make cyc

ITS (UK) has developed a ‘Scale of connections for co-operation of connected vehicles’ to help people understand how connected their vehicles are. It mirrors the existing scale for automated vehicles, the SAE international standard, which goes from Level 1 (driver assistance required) to Level 5 (fully autonomous). The ITS (UK) scale, developed by the group’s Connected and Automated Vehicles (C/AV) Forum and supported by the Department for Transport and Highways England, uses letters instead. “Currently a

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) could lead to ‘unintended negative consequences’, according to influential figures in the UK parliament. The House of Commons Transport Committee’s report on MaaS suggested that increased road congestion and poorer air quality – as well as ‘social and digital exclusion’ – could be the unwanted outcomes of the widespread adoption of MaaS schemes. “Early research and piloting of MaaS should focus not only on maximising the potential benefits but also on mitigating potential