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The grant competition finalists
The entries are in, the judges have finished their deliberations.
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The longlist has been whittled down to 20 finalists from:
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142 entries across all categories!
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This major UK-wide Competition is offering up to £150,000 for solutions that best respond to a fundamental question: What’s your vision of the way in which our roads (motorways, highways, or streets and footways) could best work for us all as we square up to the challenges of the next 50 years?​
The shortlist includes 20 entries that are eligible for either a £5,000 grant in order to further develop their ideas, a special commendation, or an alternative grant of the Trustees’ choosing.
The 20 shortlisted finalists...
Bikeworks CIC
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Ride Side by Side
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Ride Side By Side is a cycle taxi service where everyone can pedal (if they wish) to make short trips to the shops, for leisure and exercise. Three people plus the 'pilot' can travel together, and individuals or groups can book a trip. Beneficiaries include older or lonely people, people with mobility issues or visual impairment, and people with special needs.
Eloy
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Eloy Connected Vehicle Platform
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Connected vehicle services are vital for road innovation and should be incorporated into sat nav systems and existing in-vehicle experiences. This project would build a connected vehicle partner platform, enabling partners to use our technology to create their own new services and so reduce R&D cost, complexity and the need for testing.
Gemma Bridge
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Augmented reality and its potential to enhance collaboration in the planning process
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The development of an augmented reality app would increase engagement, reducing time-consuming consultation periods, therefore giving more people the opportunity to speak out and share their views on plans.
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Hertfordshire County Council
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The Ready, Get set, Go, Challenge for Primary
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The ‘Ready, Get set, Go Challenge’ would be free to all primary schools in Hertfordshire and run during Walk to School Week in May 2022, then extended to National Clean Air Day in June 2022. The aim of the challenge is to encourage children, parents, carers and school staff to travel more actively on school journeys.
KL Systems
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Creating a channel into the car - making connected cars real
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This project is an evolution of an existing experimental system for connecting vehicles so as to provide in-vehicle signage to drivers, displaying and speaking both existing roadside message signs and dynamically created ‘virtual signs’ delivered by openly available Android Auto and CarPlay navigation apps.
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National Highways
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Minecraft - roads inspiration for a new generation
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National Highways has used the world’s best-selling computer game, played by around 130 million people every month, to introduce road design, its careers and challenges to school children as young as seven. It is designed to inspire schoolchildren to think about careers in the industry.
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Phil Carey Consulting
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Wistle: working to improve the single-track lane experience
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A proposal for a new management regime for the many UK minor roads not wide enough for two vehicles to easily pass each other. Wistle uses the functionality of basic vehicle-to-vehicle communication, combined with data and detailed mapping, to alert vehicles to safe passing options.
Possible
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The Open Roads
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The UK desperately needs a way to enable people to visit Britain’s beautiful places that doesn’t transform them into car parks. Controlling access, or an “eco-levy” charge for motorists for driving on specific roads at specific times, and around popular tourist destinations, could manage traffic levels and raise revenues to fund alternatives.
Reed Mobility
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Developing ethical goal functions for road use
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CAV behaviour should be directed using ‘ethical goal functions’ (EGFs). This concept embeds the ethical interests of society into functions against which CAV developers can optimise the performance of their systems; developing and assessing these behaviours in simulation before deploying vehicles on real roads.
Tam Parry
Technical Kit for Bolt On Cycle Segregation
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This idea develops a bolt-on to CAD that provides standard CAD blocks or items which replicate available bolt-on islands, cycle lane kerb separators and other items that could be purchased and bolted to the road surface, plus a technical note showing how this idea can be applied to complex junctions so as to install effective segregated cycle lanes.
Derek Cozens
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CLEAR: improving engineering methods and standards
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UK roads conform to regulations – but they are not safe. The UK's 50-year-old engineering standards fail to address the safety issues experienced in 2021. This new initiative would update the safety aspects of road design to drive down the levels of death and injury, taking full advantage of new technologies.
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EPIKs
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EPIKs logistics toolkit for low emission deliveries in market towns
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EPIKs is piloting the introduction of a low-emissions delivery project in the Holme Valley, West Yorkshire, using e-cargo bikes. With a population of 30,000, a strong sense of community, and a comprehensive Climate Action Plan, the scheme will lower carbon emissions, reduce congestion and stimulate local trade.
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Grid Smarter Cities
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Smart Signs for the Dynamic Kerbside
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This entry is an innovative digital alternative to a traffic sign. It is a digitalised, connected device conveying real-time information to the traffic sign to inform motorists of permitted bookings and other local information.
Jenny Clark
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Rainbow Routes to School
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Children’s journeys to school should be enjoyable, safe and healthy. This project builds on existing air-quality monitoring in local schools and embeds 'rainbow routes' within a new research project collecting smartphone app-based data on active travel. The aim is to close data gaps and speed up interventions that favour active travel.
Loughborough University
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N.E.W. S.U.R.F.A.C.E.S.
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Novel Engineering Ways to Soften Urban Roads, Footways And Cars to Enhance Safety.
Road traffic accidents lead to roughly 15,000 pedestrians and cyclists being treated in hospitals in Great Britain each year, at an average cost to society of £1.5 billion. This concept aims to identify priority accident spots and replace current hard surfaces (steel, concrete and asphalt) with dynamic materials that change under different loads to soften impacts.
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OIS Inventions
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VIZOVALS Accident Prevention and Saving Lives
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The Advanced Blind Spot Sensor Information System is an affordable, retrofittable visual warning system. Lenses easily attach to windscreens, alerting drivers to pedestrians, cyclists and other road users hidden in blind spots caused by pillars, mirrors and vehicle bodies.
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Playing Out
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Children as a lens: A child-centred approach to streets and transport
This project would to develop and disseminate a child-centred approach to transport policy and practice in towns and cities. Radically, this approach would put those worst affected by poor transport planning, yet least considered by it - children - right at the heart of things. A ‘crack team’ of experts and practitioners would develop a clear set of principles.
Rachel Jupp
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Benches for Future Visionaries
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Fired by experience as a mum of young children and the struggle for safety on and alongside the roads, and a belief that 'the people's roads are for the people, not just for cars', this vision is to install benches on roadsides throughout the country, starting with a rural town.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA)
Cycle Smart: a vision for safer and better cycling
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We need to make cycling a more viable and safer everyday transport option due to its health and environmental benefits. Can we use technology to predict where collisions involving cyclists are likely to occur, and then put in place measures to prevent them?
TechEng
Rail Trails
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The 1963 Beeching Report called for the closure of around 6,000 miles of railway lines (one-third of the country's railway network). This proposal would secure what remains of these historic rail corridors and prevent any further development on this land until each route’s potential is properly assessed.
The Primary School finalists...
All Saints’ School, Gresford
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Sustainable Travel
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All Saints’ School is committed to promoting walking, scooting, cycling and other sustainable methods of transportation to and from school. To do this, the school has a peer-elected group of children who work together as ‘Active Travel Champions’ who encourage new ways to promote active journeys to and from school, including for those who live further away. These children need to use a car or bus, so the Champions worked with local businesses that had car parks that could be used by parents for drop off and collection times, so allowing them to walk, jog, scoot or cycle the rest of the way to school.
Deri Primary School
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Moving motorways -
a safer way to travel for you and our planet
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This team has designed a moving motor way. The solar powered motorway, made out of recycled plastic, will move like a conveyor belt to transport cars across long distances. This will help reduce road accidents by limiting opportunities for people to breach the speed limit as well as reducing car emissions. This project is about safer ways to travel for us and our planet, and the panel were impressed that children had used STEM skills to engineer their own moving models.
Hunters Bar Junior School
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I want to ride my bike
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Says Charlie: ‘I'm not allowed to ride my bike on the road because it's too dangerous and I can't ride my bike on the pavement because there are too many parked cars. Also, if I ride my bike on the pavement I might hurt someone. If I can't ride my bike, I like to run and walk. This is easier, but some roads are too dangerous to cross. I coded a video game with Scratch that my mum put on a website for you to play https://sites.google.com/view/trafic-yr3-child/home
Oakdale Junior School
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Streets for kids
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This is an ambitious project to combine the fantastic imaginations of children with best practice road safety design. The aim is to kickstart a culture change locally by getting kids to be at the centre of designing our streets, because if they are safe for kids, they will be safe for everyone. This 'Streets for Kids' project would design a low traffic neighbourhood for 1 mile around Oakdale Junior School, with additional road safety features on the main roads, using fun, interactive workshops.
Barlaston CE (VC) First School
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Y4 Class: slow roads
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The children think that the roads in their village are ugly because of the constant speeding traffic, and that if drivers would slow down then everyone else – young people, elderly people and those without cars – would have a chance to enjoy travelling around in peace and safety. The class had several good ideas but decided that they would invent a system so that any mobile phone in a vehicle that drove above the speed limit would lock out for 48-hours. This ‘pester power’ (the children don't have phones themselves) would make sure the parent/driver stayed below the speed limit.
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Doune Primary School
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Play on the Way
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The path to this school is dull grey tarmac with wire fencing, said the children. It’s not welcoming or inspiring. It doesn’t make us want to walk, scoot or cycle to school. Our idea is to develop the area into an active play zone. Our play path will encourage the health benefits of being active, brighten a dull space and lift spirits around Doune. QR codes will link to an app to make painted games and illusions ‘come to life’.
Mill Ford School
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Roads in 50 years
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The students created pictures and diagrams of their visions for the roads in 50 years, including alternative travel such as hot air balloon, for roads to be created over and under the sea, for roads to support hovering cars so as to allow more space to plant trees, and for lorries to have their own roads to use, which will reduce traffic.
Woodlands Great Warley
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Woodlands Year 5 Road Designs: Designs for greener, safer travel
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This is a compilation of ideas: using more electric cars by creating more charging points on roads, limiting cars to avoid overcrowding, making roads less bumpy, and having wider pavements so that it is safer for walkers. More lights at night for safety, and speed cameras ‘super-charged’ to stop speeding motorists and make our roads safer. Silver Birch, Yew and Elder trees planted along roadsides because they absorb up to 79% of pollution. And in future, flying cars so that the ground can be repopulated with trees (that produce more oxygen) and wildlife.
The Judging Process
The key requirement of the Competition was for innovative ideas, creatively presented, and the Trustees noted how well many entrants responded, sending in entries that included songs, poems, videos, paintings and models.
‘It was refreshing to hear from some new voices to the sector and be presented with some very well-thought out ideas,’ said Ginny Clarke, Trustee and Chair of the Judging Panel.
‘We were very pleased to see that many entries showed a “strong alignment” to the views of William Rees Jeffreys.’
‘I am delighted with the breadth of ideas, the quality of thinking and creativity, and especially pleased to get 142 entries,’ added Trustee Andy Graham.
The Secondary
School finalists...
Lewis Girls' School
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Power generating recycled speed bumps + roads
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This idea is for roads and speed bumps that are made from recycled plastic, but with the speed bumps having lots and lots of Piezoelectric plates built into them. When a vehicle drives over the bump, the weight of the car acts on the Piezoelectric plates and generates a small electrical pulse. This pulse of energy can then be stored in batteries and used to power street lights or even to plug electric cars into to charge them back up.
Portsmouth High School
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The Pathway to the Future
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The idea of this project is to pull many ideas which have already been thought about, and some which haven’t yet, together to create a new standard for road building over the next 50 years. For example, if we can inductively charge our cars “on the go”, then battery sizes can be reduced as well creating smaller and more efficient cars, with smaller battery packs. And what about if energy from our cars could go back into the roads? And autonomous and computer controlled cars will mean our roads will become safer. Computers aren’t affected by human error, so bad weather, bad driving, and bad tempers won’t lead to incidents on our new roads.
Ursuline High School
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Flica
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Flica is part car, part aeroplane, and can fly and travel on roads by using a vertical take-off and landing system. Flica works by having two propellers, with one propeller rotating clockwise and the other propeller rotating anticlockwise. This counteracts the rotation force exerted by the propellers so that the flying car doesn’t spin. Flica can change the direction of its thrust, increasing the manoeuvrability. Flica is powered by long term, lithium-ion batteries (100-265 wh/kg) are preferable to hydrogen fuel cells because they are completely emission-free at the exhaust.
Oban High School
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Various
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Oban High School pupils came up with seven great ideas, including using super conductors and magnets to levitate a “car”, hover cars, and underground tunnels that allow cars to clip onto a train that shuttles them up and down the country. Another idea was transparent forest roads so that the trees below the road can do photosynthesis and so that birds don't accidentally hit the road and hurt themselves while flying, plastic roads with lights underneath, and holes underneath roads so that rabbits can go under without getting hit.
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Trinity Fields School
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Roads for the Future!
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The pupils of this school have been talking about the roads of the future, and are looking forward to seeing these things happen: we’d like more reliable public transport, more electric cars, learner drivers being 19, walkways, more services for food and refreshment and better options for rest on the motorway. More police cameras, more zebra crossings and more school traffic patrol officers. More park and ride schemes, and more cycling paths and cycle to work projects – please.
Walton Priory Middle School
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RAD Project (Risk Assessment Driving)
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A group of Y8 students wondered why there are Risk Assessments for everything, except for driving. They've written a short drama to explore what a future Risk Assessment for Driving system might involve, and how our roads could be more attractive if drivers had to think more carefully about their vehicle use.
Grant Winners revealed
December 3 2021: 11:00 - 12:00
We asked...
...when you think about the role we need roads to play in 50 years' time, what do you see?
And at this event...
...we will award a grant of £5,000 each to the most outstanding entrants, in any non-school category, in order to enable them to develop a more detailed proposal for the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund Trustees to consider, subject to conditions.
There will be a cash prize of £5,000 for the best entry in each of the categories: primary schools and colleges, plus two runners-up prizes of £2,000 in each schools category