Are YOU killing people with Cars?

There is a significant amount of scare-mongering, doubt sowing and general hype about this area of fleet management. We are all so busy trying to assess our policies, practices and exposure to prosecution that we are in danger of missing the point and being no better off or safer in our operations.

 

Let us first decide what risk management is. The idea is to look at what our vehicles do, and then decide whether this represents a hazard to anyone. If it does, is there anything we can do within practical limitations to reduce or eliminate that hazard. We all know that diving a vehicle on the roads today is a dangerous thing to be doing, you only to have to look at the road death statistics and listen to the radio to find that out, BUT what can you or I do to reduce the risk. Generally speaking we can reduce risks by training and by adjusting the attitudes of our drivers, we also need to ensure that the work demands made of the drivers is not exacerbating the situation. Clearly we cannot drive each vehicle for our drivers, so we have to establish a code of practice for them to follow to maintain our duty of care to the general public.

 

Lets look at one aspect of this code of practice, speeding. Before you all put this article down, I am not a member of the ‘speed kills’ lobby, I do however firmly believe that the inappropriate use of speed is one of the main causes of accidents. I will clarify this, speed quite clearly does not kill people. Formula One racing drivers prove this point, but they cannot drive at 180mph all the time they have to use the speed in a sensible manner. The same applies to road users, it may be perfectly safe to drive at 100mph along an empty motorway in dry conditions (THIS IS ILLEGAL, BUT MAY BE SAFE), equally the same stretch of motorway may require you to drive at 50mph or less in wet, congested conditions. The problems arise when unskilled vehicle operatives fail to correctly identify what is and isn’t appropriate.

 

All drivers handbooks say in them ‘Drivers will obey all speed limits’ in one wording or another, but how many drivers have been disciplined for getting a speeding ticket? I would venture that the figure is around zero. This means that you as fleet managers are failing in you duty of care to the general public, your customers, because you are letting your drivers believe that speeding is an acceptable form of law breaking within your company. You may disagree with this statement, but this is the message you are sending.

 

Fortunately there are tools you can use to police your drivers and vehicles when they are on the road. You can use Telematics systems to report a huge amount of information to your desk. The problem then is what to do with it all. You could select vehicles at random and check their movements to identify speeding or get the Telematics supplier to give you an over speeding report, but this may only give you the motorway/dual carriageway speeders. You may also find that the mere act of fitting the equipment to your vehicles has the desired effect on speeding.

 

Another critical area is that of vehicle roadworthiness. You should all have in place a policy for your drivers to report defects on their vehicles. This should preferably be in the format of nil defect returns, to prove that checks are taking place, with documented rectification of reported defects. In addition to this you should maintain a record of all servicing and you should be giving thought to having the vehicles roller brake tested at least every six months, this is not a legal requirement, but would demonstrate ‘good practice’ and could be useful in persuading a magistrate that you took all possible steps to ensure that your vehicles were operated safely.

 

You should be auditing all of your policies on a periodic basis to ensure that people are not just paying lip service to the policies designed to keep them safe and well. You should also be prepared to take serious action, disciplinary if necessary, against any staff member caught breaking the rules.

 

All the policies you have in place apply equally to vehicles owned by the company or staff owned vehicles used on company business. It will fall to you to ensure all are taxed, insured, road legal and driven in a safe and courteous manner at all times.

 

These are the challenges we face. We can either tackle them head-on in a robust manner or we can contemplate our failings from behind bars, with a possible death of another on our conscience. The choice is ours.