Improving Work-Related Road Safety in New Zealand

Summary

Work-related road safety remains a significant risk faced by New Zealand employers and employees. There are organisational, business, legal and cost implications. The AA Driver Education Foundation in New Zealand, and several government and industry agencies, invited Dr Will Murray to run a series of risk management workshops on work-related road safety during October 2005, to identify how to improve occupational road safety in New Zealand.

The workshops were hosted in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Representatives from industry and government attended. The workshops focused on why work-related road safety in New Zealand is important for both government and industry.

This report focuses on several areas:

The extent of the work-related road safety problem in New Zealand
The main contents of the workshops, including application of the WIPE, Haddon Matrix and PROACTIVE models at the organisational level
Participant pledges which form a list of useful ideas for audit and improvement
Government-level opportunities and initiatives in New Zealand
Recommendations for improving occupational road safety.

This report provides a comprehensive review of, and guidance for the development of work-related road safety in New Zealand, based on the outcome of Dr Murray's research. It is designed to assist in the development of fleet safety policy for government and industry.

Introduction

In New Zealand, government and industry are increasingly focussing on occupational road safety^[1] in their own fleets. It emerged in 2001 that Government Ministers' cars were involved in 12 crashes during the first three months of 2001 (Milne 2001).

[1] Note that the terms occupational road safety, work-related road safety and fleet safety are used interchangeably throughout this report.

Your safe driving policy

The New Zealand Land Transport Safety Authority (now Land Transport New Zealand) released 'Your Safe Driving Policy' to show fleet operators how to develop and implement safe driving policies. It covers the following areas:

How a safe driving policy can save money
Seven steps towards a safe driving policy
The responsibilities of management and staff
The key issues every policy should address
Descriptions of driver training courses
Information on vehicle safety features
A workbook and floppy disc to help implement a customised policy.

The guide has helped organisations develop their own driving policies or update existing ones.

Land Transport New Zealand's guide to vehicle safety covers the following areas:

Active safety crash prevention features including tyres, brakes, lights/windows/mirrors, steering/traction, handling/stability, seats, air-conditioning, and warning devices
Passive safety features, including occupant protection such as crush zones and safety cages, frontal impact protection, side impact protection, size of vehicle, safety belts, air bags, seats, head restraints, safe vehicle interiors, load restraint and fire safety.

The guide is available for download from www.ltsa.govt.nz/vehicle_safety/safer_car/intro.html

HSE Act 1992

Work-related road safety has also increased in importance because of an amendment to the Health and Safety in Employment Act in 2002 see www.ltsa.govt.nz/commercial/safe-driving/introduction.html which clarified that people who are mobile when they work are covered by that Act. The Land Transport Amendment Act (2005) continued the regulation of heavy vehicles, putting in place a Chain of Responsibility framework. It extends liability from the driver to include others in the transport chain who should have acted to prevent an accident or offence, but did not. It applies to driving hours, log books, speeding by commercial vehicles, weight limits, licences, load security and dangerous goods.

Data issues

There is inadequate data on the extent of the work-related motor vehicle crashes.

The Crash Analysis System (CAS) is an integrated computer system that provides tools to collect, map, query and report on road crash and related data. The Land Transport New Zealand website (www.ltsa.govt.nz/research/toll.html) posts daily and weekly fatalities. Ministry of Transport (MoT) maintains and analyses road traffic accident data and publishes both monthly and annual statistics on its website (www.transport.govt.nz/research/) and in hard copy. No information is available on 'Purpose of journey', but incidents involving obvious occupational vehicles, such as trucks and buses, can be identified.
Health and Safety data in New Zealand does not cover on-road incidents. However, the Department of Labour suggests that as many as 20 of the 70 annual work-related fatalities could involve vehicles on sites (Hodder 2005).

This lack of data means research on work-related fatal traffic injuries undertaken by the Environmental and Occupational Health Research Centre was based on coronial files (IPRU 2003, McNoe et al 2005). It identified that work-related traffic fatalities contributed to 29 percent of all fatal injuries in the workplace in New Zealand during the time period studied. The overall rate of working fatalities was 1.1 per 100,000 workers, and for commuting fatalities the overall rate was 0.9 per 100,000 workers. Fatalities were predominantly male. Notable contributing factors included exposure, speed, lack of occupant restraints and fatigue. Work-related traffic fatalities comprise the country's largest single category, and a sizeable proportion of, work-related deaths. They conclude:

There needs to be greater awareness and co-ordination of the issues through both Government organisations and private industry.
More appropriate interventions need to be developed to lower risk, build databases and benchmark outcomes.
Incident prevention systems need to be developed in a more co-ordinated and structured manner.
Training/prevention measures need to be agreed upon collectively and standardised.
An incident investigation process needs to be developed, with particular emphasis on root cause analysis.

Vehicle fleet management workshops

One-day management development workshops were developed by the AA Driver Education Foundation www.aa.co.nz/def/AADEF%20Workshops.pdf with support from several government agencies and industry organisations, such as Exxon Mobil and Toyota NZ, to begin to address these issues.

The workshops took place in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch during October 2005. They examined the 'WHY and HOW' of improving work-related road safety, within the framework of the Haddon Matrix and the risk assessment-led PROACTIVE model.

After these industry workshop sessions, several key agencies in New Zealand, including the AADEF, ACC, New Zealand Police, Land Transport New Zealand, Department of Labour, Road Transport and Logistics Industry Training Organisation and Ministry of Transport undertook a joint discussion workshop. This workshop aimed to identify collaborative approaches to move their combined occupational road safety agenda forwards. The focus of the workshop was on definitions, data collection and research.

The remainder of this report focuses on the outcomes from all these workshops. It recommends a series of industry and government-level actions for the effective development of work-related road safety in New Zealand.

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