Safer late-night bus journeys in Outer London
2026 · Interdisciplinary team · UCL Engineering × Transport for London
Photo by Angelos Agorastos on Unsplash
The brief
How to Change the World is UCL Engineering’s interdisciplinary challenge. Our brief from TfL covered transport across Outer London as a whole system, and the first step was to narrow it to a specific problem we could support with evidence.
What we did
We focused on women’s safety on the walk home from the bus at night. We argued that an unsafe walk home pushes people towards driving, so improving safety on that last stretch could also increase public transport use.
Our proposal was a request-stop scheme: after 10 pm, passengers on any route can ask to get off between official stops. It is based on an existing scheme in Vigo, Spain, which we adapted to UK law. It’s available to everyone, so nobody has to identify themselves as vulnerable to use it. We designed how it would look in the TfL Go app, including showing users why a particular stop was suggested, mapped the stakeholders, and proposed a pilot in Croydon. Our evidence came from TfL open data, the London Datastore’s “London at Night” report and research on night workers in London.
Result
We won the How to Change the World Award 2026, and TfL invited us to present the project at its National Engineering Day at 5 Endeavour Square on 4 November 2026.