“From a more general organisational or business perspective, safety is a core activity”

Why is work-related road safety important?
From a societal perspective, there is only limited data at present because few jurisdictions around the world maintain any “purpose of journey information” in relation to road crashes. The best data currently available is for Queensland in Australia, where at least 16% of hospitalisation crashes and 24% of fatal crashes over the period 1998-2002 involved someone driving for work. In the UK there is some data emerging from police trials and estimated studies that in the region of three of the nine road fatalities per day involve someone driving for work.

From a more general organisational or business perspective, safety is a core activity and there are many quality, efficiency, environmental, marketing, business development, corporate responsibility and brand enhancement or brand protection reasons why work-related road safety is important. At the simplest level, it’s much better to be promoting a good news safety story than it is to be trying to suppress the outcomes of a major incident. Legally, many jurisdictions around the world – including the UK, Australia and New Zealand in the last year or so – have tightened up their Occupational Health and Safety regulations to include work-related driving. This means that not only do organisations have to ensure that their workers drive with the road traffic rules, but also the organisations themselves must have clearly risk assessed and documented safe systems of work in place for their vehicles, drivers, journeys, sites and processes.

From a cost perspective, the implications of workrelated road safety can be massive. One company we worked with recently had damage costs of £3m per year; they estimated that their hidden costs were approximately as much again – and their return on sales figure was 8%. This meant that just to pay for the £3m of “metal bashing costs” they had to generate £75m in revenues. Although government agencies do not have to make a profit in this way, they are using the public’s money and should be seen to lead by example in all of these areas – but how can they do it?

How can work-related road safety be improved?
It is generally agreed by researchers and managers around the world that “there are clear indications that fleet safety is most likely to be improved by the introduction of an integrated set of measures based on the safety culture within the organisation”. The joint UK Health and Safety

Executive and Department for Transport guidance on “Work-related Road Safety”, issued in September 2003, suggested that this can be achieved by taking a risk assessment-led approach to managing drivers, vehicles and the journeys they undertake. With this in mind, Napier University undertook research on one particular web-based driver risk assessment tool called RoadRISK.

“A common question and criticism of driver assessment and training programmes is ‘do they really work?’”

RoadRISK is one element of the Virtual Fleet Risk Manager (VFRM.net) developed by Interactive Driving Systems, in collaboration with universities in the UK and Australia, as well as a wide range of partner organisations around the globe. RoadRISK assesses a driver’s attitude, behaviour, knowledge, hazard perception and personal exposure to the risks of the road through a series of questions and interactive computer-based exercises. A common question and criticism of driver assessment and training programmes is “do they really work?” Apart from some anecdotes and customer quotes used in their sales literature by the driver-training industry, there is very little clear, well-researched evidence about what works from a safety improvement perspective.

Therefore, the research was undertaken because, although driver assessment and training is intuitively the right thing to do, there is very little hard research evidence that it actually improves road safety outcomes. For this reason, Napier University was commissioned to undertake an independent statistical comparison of the results from over 13,000 drivers assessed against their reported crash outcomes. This was groundbreaking, in that it was the first known study of its type by the UK fleet industry and a university. It focused on three main areas.

Relationship between assessment score and crash involvement
The Napier analysis showed that the RoadRISK assessment has some potential to predict crash involvement. This is highlighted in the graph below, where low scores on the assessment are clearly linked to higher crash rates by the two trend lines. For example, 3.7% of drivers with no crashes scored <70%, whereas 34% of drivers with four crashes scored <70%.

What Graph 1 means for road safety is that drivers with good (>80%) scores on the assessment are less likely to have crashes than those with average (70-80%) and poor (<70%) scores.

Graph 2 (opposite) from the Napier study shows a clear relationship between the scores on the individual elements of the assessment and driver crash history.

Predicting the likelihood of a driver being involved in a crash
More detailed statistical analysis in the form of a logistic regression was then undertaken on the data by Napier University. The results are shown in the following table. In simple terms, what this means for road safety is that a driver scoring <70% on the assessment is 3.3 times more likely to report four crashes than a driver scoring >80%. When the personal risk exposure element of the assessment is included a driver scoring <70% is 16.8 times more likely to report four crashes than a driver scoring >80%.

“An increase in the average RoadRISK ssessment score of 10% could reduce incidents by at least 300 for every 10,000 drivers assessed”

With such high numbers of drivers employed, a conventional approach to defensive driver training is unrealistic. BT therefore uses RoadRISK to filter those drivers assessed as being at high risk. It then looks at the identified areas of weakness and tailors programmes. In this case, RoadRISK offers a cost-effective solution to driver assessment, rather than the usual generic approach of on-road training. The outcomes from the Napier study give BT and other users, such as TNT Logistics and Arriva buses, confidence that there is a strong correlation between assessment scores and crash rates – allowing them use the RoadRISK assessment for the following tasks:

Pre-employment:

• Part of recruitment pre-screen, interview or induction process

Current staff:

• Annual assessment in conditions of employment
• Remote sites
• Selection of instructors and assessors
• Evaluate training needs and review success of training
• Post-crash investigation

Other uses:

• Allocation of company cars
• High employee turnover, agency drivers
• Risk assessments for insurance, underwriting, health and safety due diligence and vehicle hire

Conclusion
Work-related road safety is important to government and industry for a range of societal, business, legal and cost reasons. A risk-assessment-led approach has been identified by the UK government as an effective approach to managing the drivers, vehicles and journeys involved. The Napier University study described has shown the potential benefits that can be achieved by applying this methodology to driver risk assessment.

www.ufrm.net

“The main focus of each of the six central scenarios in SenseAbility has been taken from an insurance company’s records”