The police are targeting heavy transport trucks and drivers this month in a trans-Tasman blitz, until June 16.
However, it needs to be acknowledged that huge improvements have been made in heavy vehicle road safety performance since the mid-1990s.
The number of fatal accidents involving heavy vehicles more than halved over that period.
“The reduction is more significant when the growth in the number of trucks and the distance travelled is taken into account,” says the Road Transport Forum (RTF).
“Truck related fatal crashes dropped from 6.6 per 100 million km in 1995, to 2.1 per million km in 2009. Truck-related fatal accidents are now just one-third the level they were in 1995.”
The most common cause of fatal accidents involving a truck is another vehicle. The other vehicle is responsible for around 66% of all fatal truck crashes in New Zealand, just as in other countries like the United States.
In spite of this progress, trucking operators are still working hard to improve the industry’s safety performance.
According to the RTF, the industry’s improving performance is due to:
• A stringent series of driving tests covering vehicles from small delivery trucks to multi-axle A and B train rigs. These require drivers to prove thorough knowledge of the road code and rules affecting vehicle weight, dimension and performance. Age restrictions apply for each licence class and a demonstrated ability to drive each type of vehicle is also required.
• New trucks with greater safety performance and features such as traction control and ABS braking. Measures to improve truck stability and safety compliance.
• The industry is strongly promoting its own new safety initiatives such as the operator rating system, used in helping enforcement officers identify operators whose safety performance needs improving.
The road freight industry has taken the lead in promoting other measures to improve road safety. In 2004 it began pushing the Government to introduce roadside drug testing which was finally adopted in 2010.
Forum members want the Government to toughen its drug testing policy by introducing random testing, as for alcohol, and bringing in more scientific methods such as saliva or blood testing, says the RTF.
