Highways England hackathon winners announced

A team that developed a solution to address the dangers of sun glare while driving have been announced the winners of Highways England’s recent hackathon.

Taking place over the weekend of 8-9 February, the 24-hour event saw over 100 contestants from across the transport industry with small businesses, academia, large organisations, government departments and hackathon professionals all brave Storm Ciara to find ways of unlocking the value of data from England’s motorways.

Twenty teams were formed and were provided with traffic flow and accident information data from every piece of hardware on the highway network. They were then challenged to find ways of aiding decision-making, planning, improving safety, providing better service to road users and even discovering new methods of reducing disruption from maintenance.

Following the 24 hour session, the teams presented their proposed innovation to a panel of judges.

After careful consideration, Team Commuter Says No was declared the winner. The winning solution used predictive analysis of sun glare before identifying where it was an influence in road accidents and then developing a process to implement interventions that could include variable speed limits during high-risk times.

Announcing the winners a Highways England spokesman said, “Congratulations to both the winners and all 20 teams for developing some fantastic ideas and solutions and, thank you to the mentors from Connected Places Catapult, Highways England, Transport for Greater Manchester, BAE Systems, Open Data Institute, Ordnance Survey and Conga who provided unrivalled support to all the teams.”

The full list of winners are as follows:

First Prize – Commuter Says No