Recent fatal truck accidents across the nation have raised the spectre of increased regulation on the industry.
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The NSW government has warned it will throw the book at trucking companies and drivers doing the wrong thing following a spate of fatal crashes.
The more freight is transferred to roads, the more pressure is placed on time and speed of delivery, the greater this danger becomes.
The industry’s peak body, the Australian Trucking Association, is concerned about a substantial increase in the number of people killed in accidents and has called for a series of reforms.
One of its proposals is the Australian Transport Safety Bureau be given responsibility for investigating truck fatalities, which are presently handled by state and territory coroners.
The association believes this process is too time-consuming, and that more would be learned, safety-wise, if the bureau – which investigates air, sea and rail accidents – was given this added duty.
It is true the bureau produces a substantial amount of information about safety in the modes of transport for which it has jurisdiction. But it, too, can take time to finalise its investigations.
Last Tuesday, it released a report into an incident at Perth airport that took place a month short of two years ago.
A lot would depend on funding, and to this end the trucking association says the bureau would need more than $4 million a year to investigate truck accidents.
National Transport Insurance’s report shows since 2002, inappropriate speed is the most common cause of truck accidents, followed by fatigue.
In the most recent examination of 606 crashes in 2015, NTI found that speed was the predominant cause of 21 per cent of truck crashes, and that 29 per cent of “major” truck crashes were rollovers. Truck fires accounted for one in 10.
The road transport industry has long had a reputation as a hard industry, with demanding delivery schedules and alleged amphetamine use to counter fatigue.
Reforms have been put in place in recent years but a rising death toll and a consistent national accident rate in the NTI study shows there is more to be done.
Attention to speed – both by truck drivers and those around them – is the obvious place to start.