The NZ Transport Agency is teaming up with the freight industry to bring down the truck rollover crash rate, a problem that costs the country and the industry millions of dollars each year.
On average, a truck rolls over every two to three days on New Zealand roads.
In addition to the deaths and serious injuries that result, the vehicle and product-loss that results from this has a major financial impact on the freight industry and economy.
The Transport Agency is aiming to reduce the numbers to those of comparable countries – and that means we want to reduce our rate by half.
It’s not a simple fix as truck rollovers happen for a number of reasons, so we need to take a comprehensive approach.
To do this we’re teaming up with the freight industry and embarking on a programme to help bring the truck rollover crash rate down, and keep it down.
The programme kicked off in late June when we joined with the Road Transport Forum, ACC and Police to take a series of workshops around the country highlighting the success of Australia’s VicRoads Rollover Prevention Programme.
The workshops attracted around 200 industry representatives and the feedback has been very positive. The primary goal of this first step was to raise awareness around the issue, now we’re working together on our own extensive rollover prevention programme which is planned for 2015.
At the Transport Agency we’re also including the issue of truck rollover in our Safer Speeds programme, which is setting out to reduce the cornering speeds of trucks to help keep them on the road.
We’re also looking at our Heavy Vehicle Stability guide and how we can improve our communication with the freight industry around safe driving. For more about heavy vehicle stability click here.
The challenge for the Transport Agency and industry is to maintain the momentum we’ve built and make sure we work together to bring the number of truck rollovers down.
