The Transport for London Bus Safety Standard: Occupant Friendly Interiors

Document summary

The Bus Safety Standard (BSS) is focussed on vehicle design and safety system performance and their contribution to the Mayor of London’s Transport Strategy. This sets targets to for deaths and serious injuries from road collisions to be eliminated from London’s streets by 2041 and to achieve zero deaths in incidents involving buses in London by 2030.All TfL buses conform to regulatory requirements. TfL already uses a more demanding specification when contracting services and this requires higher standards in areas including environmental and noise emissions, accessibility, construction, operational requirements, and more. Many safety aspects are covered in the specification such as fire suppression systems, door and fittings safety, handrails, day time running lights, and others. However, the new BSS goes further with a range of additional requirements, developed by TRL and their partners and peer-reviewed by independent safety experts.

The occupant-friendly interiors measure has been particularly challenging. Current regulations heavily constrain designs for reasons of accessibility, so making safety improvements without conflicting with regulations and other priorities such as passenger flow and comfort is difficult. Nevertheless, beneficial changes have been identified. The process has been to examine CCTV footage to help understand how passengers are injured in harsh manoeuvre (e.g. emergency braking) and collision events. Following this, existing bus designs were reviewed to identify potentially injurious features and how they could be redesigned to reduce the risk of injury, e.g. move the handrail to reduce risk of a head strike. An assessment scheme for occupant-friendly interiors has been developed to allow bus manufacturers to incorporate safety considerations alongside the existing constraints from regulation, accessibility, flow etc. It is hoped that this will give the manufacturers a guide for producing the best compromise, without being too design prescriptive.