Improving Work-Related Road Safety in New Zealand

Data

Data is a recurring theme for everyone concerned with improving work-related road safety in New Zealand. Two particular problems are that no 'purpose of journey' data is available at the national level in New Zealand, and there is an under-reporting of road crashes. National road safety data tends to be good on fatalities, poor on injuries and almost non-existent on 'damage only' incidents. It is also true that at the lower end of the severity scale, many corporate crashes get 'lost' somewhere between the police, insurers, organisations and government agencies - particularly in cases where no workers' compensation (ACC) claim is involved.

There may be an argument for reviewing the New Zealand Occupational Health and Safety data collection system to include on-road incidents, and for the transport safety data collection system to include 'purpose of journey' information in relation to each crash recorded. Figure 2 shows some sample 'purpose of journey' data from the UK.

Figure 2 - Sample purpose of 'purpose of journey' data from the UK

Purpose of Journey	Percentage of trips
Driving as part of work	27
Driving to and from work	26
Life and network maintenance (e.g. shopping, going out)	18
Holidays and weekends away	11
Life enhancement activities (e.g. hobbies, pleasure)	10
Ferrying kids	5
Car as load carrier	3
Total	100

Having such good data would mean road safety interventions could be targeted much more on the basis of actual risks. The more information that is available related to purpose of journey, the more agencies and enterprises are able to focus initiatives directly at the issues substantiated by data collection.

Other data issues worth exploring in relation to work-related road safety in New Zealand include the ACC's compulsory insurance data, and the extent to which work-related crash claims can be identified; data from the comprehensive/private insurers; hospital data; and, the integration and standard coding of data from all available sources: national road traffic accident data and statistics, Department of Labour, ACC, other insurers and hospitals.

Purpose of journey

In New Zealand there is currently no mechanism to collect and understand the purpose of the driver's journey at the time of a crash. This means that countermeasures cannot be effectively targeted on the basis of need. To show the importance of such information, a detailed analysis of serious casualty crashes involving one or more commercial vehicles of all types (as determined by the attending police officer) was undertaken in Queensland for the five years from 1997 to 2001. This data was updated and analysed further by Murray (et al 2002). It is summarised in Figure 3.

This analysis was possible because the Queensland Traffic Incident Recording System (TIRS) included a question on 'Commercial Usage - yes or no'.

Based on this analysis, approximately a quarter of Queensland's fatal crashes and a sixth of hospitalisation crashes involve at least one commercial vehicle. The higher involvement of commercial vehicles in fatalities than hospitalisations is probably due to the size of heavy vehicles, the distances travelled and the high speeds associated with highway driving.

Figure 3 - Fatal and hospitalisation crashes in Queensland involving commercial vehicles

(Source: Queensland Transport crash database)

This data generates a major concern because most Australians are road dependent for work. The data may underestimate the problem of work-related driving, however, as there are limited resources to identify those crashes in which one or more of the vehicles was driven for work-related purposes.

Figure 4 compares commercial and non-commercial vehicles based on all the fatal crashes over the 5-year period from 1997 to 2001. Clearly, trucks are a high-risk group, being involved in over 50 percent of fatal work-related crashes. Interestingly, there is growing evidence from around the world (including the ATSB in Australia and the Automobile Association in the United States) that trucks are at fault less than other road users, who would benefit from more advice on sharing the road effectively with heavy vehicles. The truck data in Figure 4 is likely to be more accurate than that for cars. In the case of cars it is more difficult to identify whether it is a commercial vehicle or not. Further limitations are that there is no 'exposure' information to relate the data to time on the road, road type or kilometres travelled and the crash database in Queensland has not been linked with the vehicle registration (ownership) database.

Figure 4 - Fatal crashes involving commercial and non-commercial vehicles 1997-2001

(Source: Queensland Transport crash database)

At present, no such data is available for the UK or New Zealand, however both the Queensland and UK governments have recently strengthened the 'purpose of journey' elements of their crash reporting systems. The coding systems applied in each jurisdiction are shown below.

Queensland -New field on the Traffic Incident Recording System (In use since April 2006)

Driving to Work (Code 1)
Driving as Part of Work (Code 2)
Driving from Work (Code 3)
Driving to Educational Facility with child/student/self (Code 4)
Driving from Educational Facility with child/student/self (Code 5)
Life and Network Necessities and Social Activities (Code 6)
Life Enhancement Activities (Code 7)
Holidays and Weekend Away (e.g. tourism activities) (Code 8)
Other, specify ............................ (Code 97)
Unknown (code 98)

UK - question 2.29 of Police Stats 19 form: Journey purpose of driver/rider (in use since January 2005)

Journey as part of work
Commuting to/from work
Taking pupil to/from school
Pupil riding to/from school
Other/Not known

The first set of data based on these Stats 19 codes is due for publication during September 2006. A similar approach to 'purpose of journey' data should be considered for New Zealand, although data quality and police training are key success factors. More detail is available from Dr Will Murray.

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