One important thing the Covid-19 experience has taught us so far is the value of data. A lot of figures get thrown around daily but the important ones are the percentages – what percentage of the population has it; what percentage recover from it; what percentage die from it; and what is the R-value – the effective reproduction rate, or the number of people a positive case infects? The rest is just white noise and numbers used to push a particular agenda.

At the Road Transport Forum, we believe good policy and law is developed from the best data – as granular as you can get it, and thoroughly analysed. That‘s not just numbers, but what the numbers mean, what patterns of behaviour are behind the numbers, and what behaviour can be influenced and changed.

Unfortunately, in the road safety space in New Zealand, we don‘t believe decision making is data or fact driven. The data isn‘t granular enough for a start. When we go to look at truck accident rates, we find categorisation includes other vehicle clusters, such as camper vans, so we don‘t get an accurate picture.

The current government obsesses over reducing speed, but we believe that‘s a once over lightly approach, and in fact road design and engineering, and driver behaviour, are the biggest contributors to road accidents.

We need an accurate picture so we can see where we need to improve safety and change culture.

This week, Success Formula and the RTF hosted a trans-Tasman webinar to present the findings of the Australian NTI‘s 2020 National Truck Accident Research Centre Accident Investigation Report. This is an excellent report and it is inspiring to see how road freight transport in Australia has been able to improve its safety performance over time against comparable economies with the use of incredibly detailed data.

My co-hosts from NTI, Adam Gibson, transport and logistics engineer and author of the report, and Chris Hogarty, chief sustainability officer, believe there is scope for New Zealand to do better when it comes to truck road safety. New Zealand has a three-times higher long-term trend of truck occupant deaths/year than Australia.

From this engagement with our friends across the Tasman, we can see that insurers have the best data, because they are always measuring risk. We would love to see similar data available in New Zealand and I‘d like to call on New Zealand insurance companies to help with that. New Zealand government data just doesn‘t measure up.

In the Australian report, the data is incredibly detailed, down to the day of the week and time of day accidents involving trucks occur. For example, in Australia, one in five (21.1%) truck driver deaths occurred between midnight and 6am. This time period accounts for only 13.5% of truck movements, which equates to a 55% higher risk of a truck driver dying between midnight and 6am than the daily average. This kind of data allows operators to think about parking up trucks between 10pm and 4am unless they really need to be on the road for a delivery within that timeframe.

It also shows us that in 80% of all serious crashes involving cars and trucks, the car driver was at fault.

The biggest challenge ahead they see is driver distraction, often from mobile devices. The research found that the number of truck driver deaths caused by distraction more than doubled in the past two years and that 82% of the crashes involving truck drivers aged 25 years and under were caused by distraction.

The data may not always show us what we want to see, but it gives us a chance to better influence the causes of road accidents and deaths.

In New Zealand, reducing speed on open roads will not change road safety outcomes. It‘s a knee-jerk reaction to a poorly analysed problem.

The RTF would like to have accurate data to shape the way we build skills and competency in drivers to make them safer on the road, and to enable the government to better understand road safety.

Trucks transport 93% of the total tonnes of freight moved in New Zealand and that is only going to increase as the country embarks on stimulating economic growth post-Covid-19, with more exports and big infrastructure projects. Trucks are important to this country‘s future prosperity, so it is worth some time and effort to improve safety outcomes for both truck drivers, and all those they share the road with.

The Australian report is available here: https://ntarc.nationaltransportinsurance.com.au/#introduction. The webinar presentation recording is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc_mCDqKUjk&feature=youtu.be.

By Nick Leggett, CEO, Road Transport Forum