Heavy Vehicle safety performance

Dr Peter Hart, ARTSA-I Life Member.

There are two important ideas in this article.

Firstly, Australia needs an Office of Heavy Vehicle Safety probably within the NHVR, or associated with it.

The purpose of the Office would be to propose actions by government and industry that could substantially reduce the level of harm experienced.

This would cover both road trauma and industrial accidents.

Secondly, much can be learned by using statistics from different data sources and by adding vehicle knowledge into the safety considerations.

This article presents a sample of data from multiple sources in graphical form to show how additional insights into the HV road safety challenge can be gained from merged data sources.

The statistics for Australian road trauma were recently released by the BITRE (Canberra).

Fatal crashes involving a HV by state. June 2023 to June 2024. Images: BITRE.

Figure 1 shows the road trauma involving a heavy vehicle type in the 12 months up to June 2024.

HV fatal crashes/1M population (BITRE & ABS).

Figure 2 shows the HV-involved fatal crashes according to state population.

The standout jurisdictions are the Northern Territory and South Australia. Why?

They are neighbours. Figure 3 shows the number of fatal crashes involving a heavy vehicle in each state divided by the number of that type of heavy vehicle registered in that state.

Fatal crashes involving a HV divided by number registered.

The smaller the bar the better. The state of registration of the trucks involved is not (publicly) reported by BITRE.

Heavy vehicles can be involved in an incident outside the state of registration – they are mobile.

The high bars in Figure 3 identify performance that needs explanation.

ARTSA-Institute could play a positive role supporting an Office of HV safety.

However, it needs to be established by government.

Peter Hart, ARTSA-I Chair

  1. Australian Truck Radio Listen Live