Heavy metal, big damage

By ARNOLD PICKMERE

Many of the most horrific traffic accidents are collisions between trucks and cars.

Motorists often blame the trucks.

Sometimes, as with a number of recent logging truck accidents, that has been where the blame has rightly stuck. After all, logging trucks have been tipping over for a long time at the rate of about 60 a year.

Not just logging trucks have accidents, though. Other trucks regularly overturn or jackknife on Auckland motorways. Speed is often a significant factor.

When worries about truck accidents began mounting three years ago, the Land Transport Safety Authority found that trucks were involved in one in four fatal accidents in the Waikato, a region whose highways act as major routes between Auckland and much of the rest of the North Island.

Now the trucking industry, or an organised part of it, is trying to improve things.

Road Transport Forum New Zealand members represent 14,000 to 15,000 of the 17,000 to 18,000 commercial trucks operating on New Zealand roads. (There are about 70,000 trucks on the road in total.)

A study for the forum identifies a number of factors in accidents, quite a few of them not the individual truck driver's fault.

The most obvious is other drivers. In an accident a truck and its driver usually fare better than a car and its occupants.

But the study by Transport Engineering Research New Zealand Ltd showed that two-thirds of fatal crashes involving trucks were the fault of other road users.

Over half such crashes caused by other road users involved overtaking, head-on or loss-of-control crashes with other vehicles.

But that is not the main focus of the study, which has gone to the Minister of Transport.

In fatal accidents where trucks are at fault, head-on crashes (18 per cent) and cornering (21 per cent) are the major causes, with a host of minor causes from overtaking, lane changes, hitting another vehicle from behind, losing control and accidents involving pedestrians (8 per cent) accounting for lesser percentages.

Road Transport Forum chief executive Tony Friedlander says habitual offenders are a small minority of truckers but are responsible for most accidents where trucks are at fault.

"There must be a system put in place to weed them out and make New Zealand roads safer."

The study says that accidents where trucks are at fault may involve a combination of factors:

Management failure.

Vehicle condition.

Truck driver failure.

Outside pressures, like users of road transport putting undue pressure on operators and drivers.

Road conditions.

Motorist failures.

Management failure tops the list because, the study says, business entities controlling transport operations have the greatest influence on safety.

Management controls driver selection, driver training, vehicle selection and maintenance. In addition, there is strong international evidence that demands on drivers, as a result of managers accepting unrealistic delivery schedules and contract conditions, are significant contributors to truck crashes.

Attitudes to safety management also count. United States data show that companies which did not investigate crashes and took no remedial action had crash rates nine times higher than firms which followed them up.

The study says the deregulated road transport industry has delivered substantial efficiency gains for New Zealand's economy through low barriers to entering the industry and intense competition. It argues that a system of quality checks to make transport operators fully accountable is needed.

The failure of Government transport policy over many years to provide those vital elements has played a significant part in giving "economic advantages to delinquent transport operators who have deliberately compromised safety and operated illegally."

A crackdown on truck operators did occur three years ago, when 21 operators lost their licences in a safety campaign after an inquiry into truck crashes by a parliamentary select committee. They were cancelled for faulty brakes, damaged steering and overweight loads.

One operator stopped at a central Auckland checkpoint, for example, was driving a truck and trailer with no front brakes. He had been refused a certificate of fitness for poor maintenance the year before and had driven 40,000km without a certificate.

Recent Land Transport Safety surveys identified serious braking defects in 19 per cent of trucks tested.

But Mr Friedlander says the number who lose licences is very small and the 21 were over three years.

Further, he adds, there is what is known in the industry as the "corporate veil," where people put out of the industry start up again under another company name.

The number of fatal crashes involving trucks in terms of distance travelled has been tending slowly downwards since 1993. The number of trucks has not changed greatly in recent years but they travel farther and carry more, a productivity gain.

That means driving hours can be long, although driver fatigue as a contributor to crashes is difficult to measure.

The study suggests that legal driving hours be simplified to set the maximum period on duty at 14 hours on and 10 hours off, with a half-hour rest after each 5 1/2 hours on duty.

At present there are ways for drivers to work very long hours, including falsifying logbooks.

Speed and New Zealand roads are two significant factors in truck accidents.

Mr Friedlander says police do little about speeding and other offences involving trucks. The only statistics he could obtain recently was that they issued 1460 tickets to trucks in a 15-month period, a tiny fraction compared with speed-camera tickets and speed-offence notices for other motorists.

The study says speed is a significant contributor in 49 per cent of all fatal crashes were trucks are to blame. It also wants a standard speed limit of 90 km/h for all trucks.

At present the rates vary from 80 km/h to 90 km/h depending on the type of truck or truck-trailer combination. Many road users may not have noticed trucks obeying such rules except when going up hills.

Mr Friedlander says standardising the open road speed at 90 for all heavy vehicles, apart from those with stability limitations, would alleviate the problem of motorists undertaking risky overtaking to get past slower trucks.

New Zealand has the lowest level of annual roading investment per vehicle in the Western World. The study says "sub-optimum" roading is a significant contributor to crashes involving trucks.

Lack of safe passing chances makes motorists impatient and contributes to the high rate of overtaking-related crashes.

While a deliberate policy of under-investment persists, it is highly likely that the poor state of New Zealand roads will be a major contributor to the road toll.

The study recommends developing multi-lane divided highways in place of all high-traffic-volume two-way roads. In the United States, such divided highways have been credited with crash reductions of up to 75 per cent compared with two-way roads.

If that seems optimistic, the forum has further ideas for improving truck safety - bigger, heavier trucks with better stability carrying payloads 1 1/2 times larger than present loads.

At present 15 per cent of the truck fleet is contributing to 40 per cent of rollover crashes. Poor vehicle stability and handling increase the risk of rollover, loss of control, jackknifing and trailer swing.

Mr Friedlander says, for example, that some modern logging trucks are much more stable than others in use.

The forum argues that research here and abroad demonstrates significant benefits from an increase in weights and dimensions for trucks. It would accelerate the replacement of less-stable vehicles with safer combinations and would cut the number of trucks needed to shift given volumes of freight.

Transit New Zealand is examining such suggestions.

But even if bigger trucks do not appeal to other motorists, at least the Road Transport Forum's aim of halving truck-at-fault crashes by 2010 should please them.