In any analysis of the contributing factors to road trauma in Australia, the crash data involving vehicles makes for sobering reading.
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Heavy transport is grossly over-represented in crash data across the country, with 18 per cent of all road crashes involving a heavy vehicle and with an average of 200 people per year killed in crashes involving heavy trucks.
Many inquiries have been held into how to address the issue, most recently a 2020 Productivity Commission in 2020 report on national transport regulatory reform and last year, a Senate standing committee looking into how to develop a "viable, safe, sustainable, and efficient road transport industry".
The latter inquiry had been instigated by a former truckie, WA Labor Senator Glenn Sterle, who drove road trains between Perth and Darwin for 12 long years.
The inquiry found that road transport drivers are more likely to experience chronically poor physical and mental health. It also found that driver work conditions often included long hours, sedentary work environments, poor nutrition, social isolation, shift work, time pressures, and fatigue.
But traction on any of the committee recommendations has been ponderously slow, or has stalled completely.
BLAKE'S LEGACY:
Separate from the truck inquiry, former federal transport minister Darren Chester last year chaired a broad-ranging joint standing committee inquiry into road safety, which included submissions from multiple stakeholders in the heavy transport industry.
Mr Chester said the inquiry, which spanned months and in which the oral submissions were conducted virtually, generated some good ideas.
Overwhelmingly, he said, the Australian community generally had become "a bit immune and accepting of a degree of road trauma being inevitable".
"I don't accept that," he said.
"Road trauma costs the Australian economy $30 billion per year and the enormous social cost on top of that with people who are scarred for life and families who have lost loved ones means we have to keep on doing as much as we possibly can to eliminate road trauma."
He said that for the heavy vehicle sector "the road is actually a workplace".
"And everyone is entitled to expect the safest workplace possible."
He acknowledged that in many cases the heavy vehicle driver was not as fault but given the greater mass of the heavy vehicle those crashes result in more serious injuries and deaths.
"One of the things we can do, I believe, is help to stimulate investment in newer [heavy] vehicles which have safety features for drivers, but also protect other road users using crash avoidance technology.
"And helping to reduce the fleet age, I think, can deliver safety benefits to the broader community."
Australia's large fleet operators such as Toll, Linfox and Finemores invest heavily in new trucks and technology so as to improve their operating efficiency and satisfy occupational workplace health and safety requirements.
However, smaller transport companies and owner-operators don't have the financial wherewithal to do so.
"A lot of trucks that are owned by individual operators or the agricultural sector may be only used infrequently and there's no economic driver for those owners to upgrade their trucks because they don't use them as much as the linehaul operators," he said.
He said addressing this issue [of older trucks] is not through punitive measures but through other measures such as accelerated asset write-offs.
Evidence presented to the committee showed there needed to be more investment in purpose-built rest areas on highway "to allow proper mandatory breaks so that drivers are actually getting a rest".
He also acknowledged that very good work has been overseas on identifying the dangers of heavy vehicles interacting with vulnerable road users.
"For the heavy vehicle sector, the [City of London] model is well worth exploring more to see whether it has an application in our bigger cities and our larger regional towns," he said.
He said the second stage of Canberra's light rail project, which will bring thousands of heavy truck movements into the busiest part of the city, "reinforces the need for training ... for the drivers to ensure they are well-equipped to operate safely in that [city] environment".
"The professional drivers who take their role seriously simply don't want to be involved in crashes and we need to help them to be as safe as possible."