ANALYSING THE ANNUAL ACCIDENT DATA

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.

The 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.

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,

Truck driver deaths by cause.

tyres were the top cause. Bearings came in at number two and brakes were the third, causing 15 per cent of the incidents.

“We saw a slight increase in fires as a proportion of all events, it went from eight per cent to ten per cent. It rose on the back of wheel end fires and not on engine bay fires,” says Adam Gibson, NTI Transport and Logistics Risk Engineer. “Even when we look at engine bay/ cabin fires, it’s still 55 per cent electrical fires and it’s still, overwhelmingly, starter motor power cables.

“If I could have operations managers or workshops fix two problems in trucking to do with fires, it would be putting in place some sort of inspection regime around the starter motor power cable – to make sure it’s well protected and well supported – as well as something about wheel ends. Either go to preset bearings or do something about brake hoses and chambers. Tyres are the biggest slice, we had a bunch of tyrerelated wheel end fires.”

Interestingly, drivers under 25 were over represented in incidents involving inattention. One third of accidents

Fire incidents by sub-cause.

involving this age group were caused by distraction of some kind.

“The biggest surprise we have found from operators we know are using fatigue detection technology is that although they put the systems in for fatigue, the wakeup call is around mobile phone usage,” says Adam. “Some of the tech is very good at detecting people looking down at their phones on their lap.”

“Fatigue is still the leading cause of injuries and deaths. The results are slightly less consistent, but slightly improved, when compared to previous reports. As with our previous report, it is the largest cause of our insured drivers losing their lives.”

What this study hasn’t been able to get a handle on yet is the overall effect of the inclusion of fatigue management technology in trucks on the accident data. the amount of data available is not large enough for 2019, but Adam is expecting the numbers to be significant enough in the 2020 data to draw some initial conclusions.

The report compares the numbers of crashes caused by fatigue in each state with freight volumes in each state to make a fair comparison between them. South

Wheel end fires by source.

Australia has fatigue related incidents at double the rate of the national average. By the same metric, the state which suffers the least from this problem is Victoria, with numbers at one third of those nationally.

ANALYSING FIGURES The class of truck being driven has different issues when included in these figures. Although multiple combinations larger than B-double only make up 11 per cent of trucks involved in incidents, they made up almost 26 per cent of those involving fatigue. For B-doubles, the problem is not quite so bad, but although they make up 21.5 per cent of trucks involved in the figures, they represent over 32 per cent of those in fatigue accidents.

The regularly quoted statistic that states that 80 per cent of all fatal crashes between a car and a truck are caused by the car is borne out yet again by the 2019 figures. On the other hand, when looking at car and truck crashes which did not involve a fatality, the truck was at fault 60.5 per cent of the time.

Mechanical failures have consistently stayed around the five per cent mark, with a blip in 2017 which saw the numbers jump up to seven per cent. However, steer tyres do make up 52.9 per cent of these incidents, plus 5.9 per cent of the incidents were caused by damage to other tyres. Interestingly, there were no incidents recorded in the statistics in rigid trucks, caused by mechanical failure.

As the years go by, this report has become more useful in pulling together exactly what is happening out on our roads and bringing the industry’s attention to the issues on which it needs to concentrate to avoid accidents and improve safety outcomes on the highway.

A sharp rise in fires ten years ago reported in the NTARC reports of the time led to a lot of work to reduce the risk of fires, resulting in lower levels of fire incidents in the years since. These are the kinds of tangible outcomes that this reporting system can enable.

HEAVY VEHICLE LAW REFORM;

HAVE WE MISSED THE MARK?

In June 2020 the National Transport Commission (NTC) released the longawaited consultation regulatory impact statement (RIS) on the review of the heavy vehicle national law (HVNL). This review promised to be a ‘root and branch’ look at a law that fundamentally hasn’t changed in decades. So, has it hit to mark? Can we expect real change?

Well, firstly, you can’t fault the NTC in their consultation process. There was plenty of promotion and opportunities to have a say. The RIS is based on more than 250 formal submissions and 350 informal submissions received in workshops, email or online. After extensive discussions with our members the Australian Livestock and Rural Transporters Association (ALRTA) lodged a formal submission to NTC on behalf of our six state associations and 700 grass roots members that included 108 recommendations.

It appears that NTC has listened to industry and government. The RIS contains more than 40 different options covering all facets of the law including access, fatigue, vehicle design, technology, accreditation, primary duties and chain of responsibility.

If you are a fan of technology there is a lot to like. The NTC claim both industry and governments want the HVNL to recognise new technology as an alternative means of compliance. It would be fair to say that the current law assumes a paper-based environment and the amount of paperwork drivers must carry is bordering on the ridiculous. Anything that promises to reduce this paper burden will be a relief to many.

But not everyone is a fan of technology. There was a rigorous debate in the rural sector about whether or not to support voluntary electronic work diaries (EWD). While some saw EWDs as an easy way of reducing book keeping errors that attract disproportionately large fines, others saw it as the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ with a ‘big brother’ real time monitoring and tracking system sure to follow – and they may be right.

The RIS proposes to enable the HVNL to be flexible in recognising the adoption of new technologies to manage safety risk. For example, ‘seeing eye machines’ could become an alternative to prescriptive fatigue rules and road access could be improved with real time tracking technologies. And you guessed it, there are already prominent government and industry players calling for these to become mandatory – but only if the rest of the rules are ‘right’.

Which brings us to fatigue and access.

Drivers almost universally say that the current HVNL forces them to drive when tired and rest when they’re not. Who is going to stop a truck to sleep in it when you could be home in 20 minutes? Overly prescriptive rules, coupled with a chronic lack of rest areas with decent amenities, frustrate productivity and can make some situations less safe.

The RIS examines options including simplified counting rules, simplified record keeping, moving to a risk-based system, widening the scope of regulated vehicles, applying new rules to high-risk drivers, improved assessment of fitnessfor-duty and of course using technology to monitor fatigue in real time and mandating electronic records.

The RIS similarly includes a range of options for improving road access for higher productivity vehicles. Some of these include increasing GML to CML limits, marginally increasing vehicle length, modifying vehicle classes, decision deeming, independent review processes and recognising official maps in law.

While most of the proposals would be an improvement there is nothing that fundamentally changes the current access system. It is still the same vehicles requiring the same approvals from the same authorities in the same timeframes. Even if all of the options were applied together it would not remove B-double access to the farm gate from the permit system.

It is critically important to get fatigue and access right. Although the RIS does not include a cost : benefit analysis, it has always been clear that most of the safety benefits will come from better fatigue management and most of the productivity benefits will come from improved access.

ALRTA’s early assessment is that the RIS is not bold enough in recognising higher productivity vehicles as the modern standard in rural areas. B-doubles were novel decades ago and so permits made sense. Stock crates at 4.6m are also standard and used almost universally. It is time to recognise these changes and re-cast the access system so that ‘normal’ vehicles can undertake ‘normal’ tasks without unnecessary regulation.

If governments neglect this once in a generation opportunity to fix fatigue and access, Australia may also miss the boat on a technology-based revolution in heavy vehicle regulation, or worse, it could be the same old law but with big brother watching you.

LOOKING FOR 21ST CENTURY RULES

A root and branch rewrite of the Heavy Vehicle National Law is taking place and after extensive consultation, the Regulatory Impact Statement released by the National Transport Commission sees the agency looking for 21st century rules to take the trucking industry forward.

If there is one thing all of the stakeholders around the development of the all-new Heavy Vehicle National Law (HVNL) can agree on, it is that the current law is inadequate to cope with the kind of regulation needed to take the trucking industry into the future, as technology and changing demands recalibrate the way the industry sector will function.

The process started some time ago with the National Transport Commission (NTC) being tasked with drafting a completely new law as the inadequacies of the current HVNL became more apparent. The current regime was cobbled together as the government “ACCORDING TO HVNL 2.0, THE FUTURE HVNL SHOULD BE A MODERN LAW THAT PROVIDES A FLEXIBLE, RISK-BASED REGULATORY FRAMEWORK TO ENSURE THE SAFE AND EFFICIENT OPERATION OF HEAVY VEHICLES ON AUSTRALIAN ROADS.”

tried to unify rules around the time of the founding of the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator and those rules turned out to be exactly what they are, an inadequate compromise.

When the transport ministers of Australia decided to ask the NTC to come up with a new set of rules back in November 2018, they were not asking for a change in the basic principles behind the law, but instead, were asking for, ‘reforms that could improve the effectiveness of the HVNL’.

During the first consultation period, an expert panel was created to sift through submissions and to advise the