Reducing death and injury on our roads – Be the CHANGE, it’s personal.

As an industry looking to eradicate risk to vulnerable road users from construction-related vehicle journeys, our previous Safety Forum #12 looked at how we consider the competencies of those driving these vehicles.

In Safety Forum #13, Mark Cartwright, Head of Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention at National Highways and Lead for Driving for Better Business, talked to the CLOCS community about how we need to understand and consider other factors that affect the safety of vulnerable road users.

Mark shared data to demonstrate the size of the challenge with approximately 50% of the traffic on our roads being work-related, whether HGVs or vans, company cars, or the ‘grey fleet’, private vehicles being driven for work purposes.

He also highlighted some the critical issues which should be considered beyond skills and competencies – experience, boredom/attention levels, fatigue and mood, all of which can have a huge impact on drivers, their performance behind the wheel and their ability to react to a sudden change in the traffic.

Driving for Better Business have developed a number of resources, free of charge and available to all, to assist with tackling many of these issues and improving standards.

The Van Driver Toolkit is a series of driver information online modules to assist van drivers and fleet operators in dispelling uncertainty and myth. You can share the whole toolkit with your drivers, or you may prefer to share individual modules whenever you want to check understanding of best practice or reinforce your driving for work policies.

All of these resources can be shared across your colleagues, the wider business, customers, supply chains, friends and family and Mark suggested an ‘encourage recommend and mandate’ approach to implement such standards and move towards a place where such standards are accepted as the norm.

The toolkit will help you implement best practice for what is required to reduce costs, improve operating conditions and ensure safe and legal vehicles and wellbeing for your drivers.

Mark also highlighted further information including the PACTS (The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety) report which highlighted vans and light goods vehicles as being involved in more deaths of other road users than any other vehicle type, more even than HGVs.

Mark suggested we all look at a short but powerful video put together by the Victoria Transport Accident Commission (TAC) to highlight that behind the numbers there are real people with friends and families. It ends with the line ‘there’s no one someone won’t miss’.

Mark also highlighted CALM Driver as an initiative aimed at providing information and support to those who work behind the wheel.

He concluded by talking about several of the initiatives and trials being delivered by National Highways and invited CLOCS Champions to get involved.  The issues they have been tackling include tailgating, mobile phone usage, lack of seatbelts and also working with fleet operators to take their vehicle registration information and provide data back on vehicle performance.  If anyone would like to know more, please contact Mark directly.

Looking forward

Mark delivered an extremely enthusiastic and informative presentation that was appreciated by all. We would urge all Champions to connect with Driving for Better Business and to tap into the resources available, and also to look at some of the other information shared by Mark, detailed above.

CLOCS is now working closely with Mark and his team to bring other resources to the CLOCS community and these will be included in future CLOCS Bulletins.

Please connect with CLOCS and Driving for Better Business on LinkedIn to make sure you don’t miss a thing and have the opportunity to like, comment and share the posts to spread this information across your own networks.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/driving-for-better-business/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/clocs/

Mark can be contacted on 07598 559366 or at mark.cartwright@nationalhighways.co.uk.

And finally…

Our thanks to Mark for giving up his time to share his vast knowledge and insights with the CLOCS community and also those who attended, sharing their own insights and experiences.  The voice of Champions is vital to the success of CLOCS so please contact the team if you have any queries, suggestions or concerns about any aspect of CLOCS.