Traffic management company Traffic Safe New Zealand is introducing new robotic cone machines that deploy and retrieve traffic cones onto and from the road, helping keep workers out of harm’s way.
Imported from Austria, the trucks – nicknamed ‘Conan’ – aim to reduce the risk of accidents by removing the need for staff to hang off the back of the truck to manually deploy and retrieve the cones.
Chief executive Pierre Crous says the safety-led innovation brings New Zealand into line with other leading traffic management companies around the world.
“One of our core values at Traffic Safe is ‘everyone home safe, every day’,” he says.
“Having our people on the back of a truck with traffic whizzing past at speed constantly puts our teams’ safety at risk. By introducing Conan that risk is eliminated as the machine does the work for us.”
A recent road test conducted by Traffic Safe NZ at Hampton Downs, using a crash test dummy, showed that a passing car could be as close to 20cm from an employee’s head when they are dropping the cones onto the road manually.
“It is not only dangerous but can be scary for our people, so we knew we needed to do something different”, Crous says.
“No one wants to have to tell an employee’s family that their loved one has been seriously injured or is never coming home.
“With safety always a number one priority, this not only makes Conan a real game changer for us but also for the entire industry.”
