Abu Dhabi Gears Up for Safe School Transport Ahead of New Academic Year

Buoyed by the successful completion of its summer preparations, the Abu Dhabi Mobility is now ready to commence another academic year with improvements on school transport safety in the emirate. Measures are geared at ensuring that students transport to and from school is safe and has minimal inconvenience every day and the movement of pedestrians, school transport, other public transport, and other private users within school zones. The initiative prioritizes two key areas: more so, the student awareness and the general improvement of related infrastructures.

Abu Dhabi Mobility working with Abu Dhabi City Municipality, Al Ain City Municipality, Al Dhafra Region Municipality, the Department of Education and Knowledge and the Abu Dhabi Police, aims to ensure the safe transport system in accordance with the vision of the leadership to improve the quality of life in the community.

In order to work with the students, Abu Dhabi Mobility organisation implemented several traffic safety campaigns during the second quarter of 2024 targeting over 800 students across schools. Such campaigns intervene here with an endeavor of ensuring that the students understand how to safely use seats in school buses and how to move within school compounds. More schools will join the campaigns at the onset of the 2024-2025 academic year as campaigns will be more interactive, fun, appealing and age-appropriate bent on creating new habits among students regarding their safety.

In the area of infrastructure, Abu Dhabi Mobility has done research and development to come up with improvements on more than 90 schools where there are transport and road safety issues. Through consultations from the school administration, questionnaires, problem identification from the field trips, the initiative aims at; strengthening the parking areas for buses as well as private cars and spacing ways around the school zones. The detailed design phase is at the moment being carried out while inception is set for early 2025.

To enhance safety in school transport the following measures have been adopted; Routine school bus inspections, training of operators, drivers, and supervisors, assigning field inspection teams at those schools that experience heavy traffic. Other changes to the technical requirements for school buses are also allowing incorporating new safety elements, for example, the fourth stop sign for the buses of increased size.

In the regulatory capacity, ADM is still observing the school transport sector by evaluating the Salama— smart system with many operators including 206 operating more than 8,500 bus and around 9,000 drivers. Given over 237 000 learners that engage school transport, the