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Putting safety first
Page 30
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Safety is paramount in the transport industry, so how do you increase it? CM's news team went to the Transport Research Laboratory to find out.
Integrated systems are the future when it comes to improving industry safety. says Dr Tim Gamon, director of strategic partnering at the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL).
For example,vehicles could pick up information from the roadside or from other vehicles on the road. This might mean that if a car in front begins to brake it could transmit a signal to your own car or truck, which would then begin to slow, long before you could hope to react.
There is also the possibility that the use of GPS will allow vehicles to anticipate dangers such as tight bends or low bridges and slow or stop them before they reach it.
However, says Gamon, the impetus for change has to come from within the industry Each year around 50 truck drivers or passengers arc killed in accidents: not a massive number when compared to the total of 3,200 people killed on the roads last year, but still 50 too many. In fact. although trucks represent only 6% of the traffic on the road, they are involved in 8% of all accidents and 18% of fatal accidents.
The true cost Gamin says the figures mask the actual cost to society or individual companies of even minor accidents. "One thing we found when working with big fleets was the poor quality of the data that they held on the cost of accidents. Usually, they'll just go to their insurer and ask the annual cost of claims—generally the cost of repairs."
However, if you take into account the time taken by, and the costs associated with, an accident —not least the damage to reputation — the cost of the most serious accidents is about five to 10 times higher than estimated.
Gamon points to instances where data has been collected but not normalised or averaged out per truck, meaning that depots running several hundred trucks are being castigated for high overall costs — while a depot with 10 vehicles and a smaller overall bill has a higher cost per truck.
What TRL would like is a standard form to be filled in after an accident in order to provide