Figure 1

“It is a testament to the work of the automotive industry that so many drivers and passengers survive collisions”

We respond fairly well to what we see or hear at a speed no faster than a running human: we take decisions based on what we see or hear relating to instincts to fight or flee. Our bodies are constructed for this existence – run into a tree or rock face at full tilt, and you may be seriously hurt (a message to you that this kind of behaviour is not to be encouraged!) but you are highly unlikely to be killed. We are designed to withstand impacts of this nature. So, in the driver, we have something designed to operate best at speeds of less than perhaps 15mph (which of course is why pedestrians usually survive much better when vehicles hit them at low speeds) and which can assess and avoid hazards moderately well within those performance parameters.

Let us consider the driver as an item of work equipment. Would we allow any other piece of equipment within the work environment to be used so far outside its design threshold? Would we attempt to cram 70 people into a lift designed for five people? Of course not. Why then, when human beings can’t walk down a crowded high street at 5mph without occasionally brushing against other shoppers, do we expect to be able to travel at 70mph and not bump into things? In pure health and safety terms, the fact that we allow humans to drive for work is amazing – the fact that in many cases they are allowed to do so with so little management of that risk is frightening. It is scarcely surprising that the vast majority of collisions are caused in full or in part by some element of human error, and yet typically this is the area which is most neglected in terms of the management of Work Related Road Safety.

This is an over-simplification of the adaptability of the human creature, but it underlines the scale of the problem. We haven’t evolved to cope with the speed of travel we expect to undertake, to respond to hazards encountered at closing speeds of up to 120mph when two law-abiding citizens meet each other on a rural two-lane road. It is a testament to the work of the automotive industry, encouraged with great force by the Euro NCAP programme, that so many drivers and passengers manage to survive collisions.

Yet the vehicle manufacturers can do nothing in the construction of their product to improve the performance criteria or the crashworthiness of the human component called the driver: they can only try to mitigate as best they can against its failings. To make matters worse, road transport is one of the areas where workers are often expected or allowed to provide their own equipment. Companies don’t usually expect an employee to provide their own forklift truck or lathe, and if they did then they would certainly check that the lathe came with all of the relevant safety features, and was in good working order.

Yet many companies expect employees to provide a vehicle to make work journeys (sometimes with colleagues), often without insisting that the vehicle has basic safety features such as airbags or ABS; without reference to NCAP data as to the crashworthiness of the vehicle, and in many cases, making no checks that the vehicle is actually roadworthy. Figure 1, data from a global transport operator, illustrates the dichotomy between what is found to be causing their road safety problems and the amount of attention and effort that has been put into resolving each area. This is typical of the type of situation found in most companies – efforts are concentrated on systems and procedures, rather than on analysing the safety culture of the organisation and attempting to address its shortcomings.

Figure 2

“Road transport is one of the areas where workers are often expected or allowed to provide their own equipment”

Figure 2 shows the improvement in safety performance that one company, operating in the Middle East, managed to achieve through a combination of measures, focusing on where their problems actually lay. The introduction of a Defensive Driving Course in mid 2001 was a particular success, as the move not only helped to improve the knowledge and skills of their drivers, but also sent a powerful message about the priority management was placing on road safety. Over 16,000 drivers went through the scheme in the first three years, with more than 10,000 of those being reassessed in the same period. Drivers are now trained, assessed and certified by the company, with an age limit of 21 for business driving and regular awareness-raising sessions on road safety. Vehicles have to be certified by the company as being roadworthy and any new company light vehicle in the past four years has to have dual airbags and ABS – a major step in a part of the world where road safety is generally not a marketing issue, and such features were not available as standard on many vehicles.

A Safe Journey Management system monitors and controls journeys that have higher-risk profiles. Although all of this has been achieved in a company engaged in transport operations in a traffic environment with fatalities per 100,000 population running at more than double the UK rate, there are valuable lessons for fleets here. Identifying and focusing on high-risk areas is the best approach, which may involve thinking outside the box and looking for data sources beyond the traditional internal company information. There is now good quality, independent research in the public domain on many factors affecting work-related road safety and driver performance, but there are other sources too. If you have vehicles using regular routes, for example, consider using the Freedom of Information Act to discover the crash history of that route. You may find that you can either re-route on to a safer alternative, travel at a different time of day, or simply use the information to provide detailed driver briefings, such as the specific type of crash most common at a particular junction.

However, issues such as traffic volumes on different routes, and at different times of day, can lead to a misleading picture to the inexperienced. Two junctions with a similar numbers of collisions in a three-year period may appear to offer the same level of risk, but if one junction carries half the traffic volumes of the other, it actually has double the collision rate per 10,000 vehicles. Be careful then to make sure you are comparing like with like, and that interpretation of the crash data is carried out by someone competent to do so.

Addressing the high-risk areas in your operation can offer great dividends, but needs to be done with a depth of understanding of the issues which few fleets have developed to date.