INDUSTRY ISSUE
ANNUAL ACCIDENT DATA ANALYSING THE
The latest data about truck accidents around the country is going to be available yearly from now on. Diesel talks to the report’s Author, Adam Gibson.
T
he trucking industry can look forward to keeping up to date with issues around truck safety more regularly from now on as the National Truck Accident Research Centre (NTARC) will be bringing out its Major Accident Report annually, as opposed to biannually. The full 2020 report has now been released and, in fact, in the last issue of Diesel, we previewed the preliminary fatigue related results for our Fatigue Special report.
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DIESEL September-October 2020
The report uses the data gathered by National Transport Insurance (NTI) on all major accidents that go through its system. A major accident is defined as one costing over $50,000, and NTI recorded 848 of these in 2019, a large enough sample to get a real picture of what is going on out there on our roads. The precision of these reports is being improved all the time. In the past, data collection was more difficult and the report only appeared every two years. NTARC
has also updated its procedures and data structures to better fit with the way police and transport departments around Australia record incidents. A number of headline figures stand out in the report. Between 2017 and 2019, the frequency of accidents dropped from one in 400 to one in 500. There was a sharp increase in accidents caused by distraction and inattention. There was an increase in truck driver deaths, no NTI-insured drivers had died in 2017 and this was not the case in 2019. Driver error was deemed to be the cause in 39 per cent of all incidents, it was 29.6 per cent in 2017. Number one error was driver inattention, the second was following too close and the third was inappropriate vehicle positioning, such as cutting corners etc. The decrease in the number of accidents caused by inappropriate speed has continued. It was nearly 28 per cent of incidents back in 2013 and had dropped to 14 per cent by 2019. These top three causes represent over 80 per cent of all cases of driver error included in the figures. Going against a trend of the past decade, the number of incidents caused by fire has crept back above ten per cent. This has been a stubborn issue which seems to persist despite efforts by the industry. An interesting change in the figures shows an increased share being caused by wheelend fires, rising from 33 percent to nearly 50 per cent of non-impact fires. The second worst reason was in engine bay/cabin fires at 31.8 per cent. With the wheel-end fires,
