Hello and welcome to episode five of the project EDWARD 2023 Podcast. My role in the Safe system. This week our reporter is Darren Lindsey and he's in conversation with Mark Cartwright from National Highways for a discussion on some of the unique challenges faced by truck and van drivers on the Strategic Road Network and a look at what's being done to improve levels of safety, compliance and driver well-being.

Darren met Mark at the recent Fleet Operators Recognition Scheme (FORS) Conference in Birmingham, first asking him about the benefits of technology in supporting drivers.

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Darren met Mark at the recent FORS conference in Birmingham, first asking him about the benefits of technology in supporting drivers. I think it's a fairly obvious thing to say that there are all kinds of benefits about the proper application of technology in all vehicles calls, vans, trucks. I guess there's two things that while I'm all in do that, though, is, number one, we do want the drivers still to recognise that they are in control of a vehicle.

Unknown

And without sounding too melodramatic, it's a phrase that he was very off to the killing machine. So they still are driving that vehicle. And I do have some concern that we get more and more insulated and isolated from the from the task of driving. The other piece is something that really hit us between the eyes a little bit a few months ago when we were doing some work around AEB Autonomous emergency braking systems, probably mainly these, but the same principle applies, which is actually it's really difficult for an operator or risk consulting or anybody else actually understand the status of that equipment within the vehicle.

Unknown

Fundamentally, the and I'm no no engineer, but fundamentally the signal is sent when the catalyst of the vehicle is encrypted to give it priority over all the signals that go in and the cameras, which are clearly what you would want it to have, which means it's virtually impossible in the moment for an operator to interrogate a system and understand the status of the of whatever piece of aid US equipment by the pieces that are involved.

Unknown

So, again, an example, we we would say we were focusing on selecting the tier and HD, the AEB systems. We spoke with a number of fleet managers. What would your attitude be to your drivers desire to believe in that perfectly able to do so legally and the way the legislation is written? But what would your attitude to drivers decide?

Unknown

I agree. Systems that have a case to answer. Why am I switching off a piece of safety equipment? I'm going to second that would I know that they switched off. And if you take that stage further and look at the equipment that's coming forward, the fleet operator Wouldn't it be useful to know that your driver has triggered that IED system?

Unknown

Wouldn't it be useful to know that the driver is disabled, the ITV system? Wouldn't it be useful to know what they've triggered? They're lying. Keep System X number of times a day because all of a sudden they point to the fact that that driver might not be operating and driving the vehicle in an optimum call in the manner is, if you like, it's almost free driver feedback.

Unknown

And that piece is missing from the equation at the moment. We do a lot of work with Euro and Cup behind the scenes. On the drafting of a standards for ISG that is amending the existing standards for VANS, and I think that's one of the things we really keen on. It's not just about bolted new bits of technology on there, it's about facilitating a process for operators, risk professionals, whatever to be able to interrogate that data.

Unknown

That's better understanding the drivers behind you. So just taking you back a step there, transparency in terms of understanding why this technology is in the vehicles is of equal importance. But what are you doing at National Highways about the training and the education to increase the awareness of this technology? Do you have any campaigns or anything like that running at the moment?

Unknown

So we do supply that. That's a business campaign which is all about raising awareness and providing support within operational organizations. We did quite a lot last year around the AEB systems and trying to increase awareness across not just for drivers but across operators about, well, not just the benefits of the process in the system, but also some of its well, I like to call them limitations, but people almost over estimate the abilities of AEB systems.

Unknown

And also coming back to the point about who is interpreted we and that could be any secrets of why breakaway competencies. So we did a fair bit work in talking to various ICD manufacturers about their systems. But what was quite interesting, most of the time they fielded the product management marketing type. People have a certain way of using the language.

Unknown

A couple of them simply drive the trainers along, which is a somewhat different way of using the English language than what they were saying. It was really quite quickly in words, one syllable. If you've got a driver that keeps triggering an IED system, it's almost certainly not because of the problem with the AB system. It's more of a problem with the driver's style that too aggressive in terms of agility profiles.

Unknown

So that kind of information is dynamite. Why wouldn't you want to know that? So it's about training people, about the way that the systems work, why they're doing what they're doing as well as also providing the interrogation ability for operating. Now you've managed the largest network of roads in England and sometimes things go wrong. Vehicles, breakdown, commercial vehicles.

Unknown

What is it? Drivers. These are professional drivers, of course. What is it they should be doing when a vehicle breaks down today? Have things changed or is it still as we know it or is there any new changes to get that traffic flowing again? I guess the initial answer to that is we would be expecting them and that employees, employers rather than managers and the supervisors to be doing the government is to make sure the vehicle didn't break down on our network in the first place.

Unknown

Very often you could almost classify it as self-inflicted. Some of the things that we we identify out there, not so much with HGV use to be perfectly honest, but certainly in terms of values on a network, you know, the driver knew that they were about to run out of fuel. That's always when they go away and you might have a weird and wonderful noise.

Unknown

So it almost a bit self-inflicted. And we're starting to look more and more about how we can, number one, influence that behavior from it. From a carriage point of view, only, you know, well, come on. That we can see you're a good a good operator, a good driver to the seven vehicle, but also potentially a bit more about a stick as well.

Unknown

We we we operate a problem we call green claims, which is where we will claim funds back from operators. Typically, if I crush and break our barriers and lights and all the rest of it will probably be carted away. But, you know, we all look exactly. It's about how we use that. If you took a vehicle knowing there was a fair chance of stopping on the network, once you be on that piece, it comes down to really just managing that process as well as we can with the least amount of risk is number one and the least amount of disruption.

Unknown

And we run our golf campaign a couple of years ago, that wasn't everybody's cup of tea, but the message was absolutely send it's go left, you know, don't stop on. And that will keep us any chance at all of you being able to reach the next junction, get yourself off the network. The less if, heaven forbid, you all break it down and stop in our line at work.

Unknown

If it's a typical piece of metal to get yourself onto the hard shoulder, get yourself as far left on to the whole shoulder as you can clamber over the left on side of the vehicle. Get yourself beyond the barrier, walk towards the traffic so that you know you because entry is safer. Object as you can if you've got all of these, all of these on, etc., etc., etc., all very obvious stuff when we're talking about it in this nice little environment, not always quite as obvious when all else broken loose at the cellular ice TVs as well.

Unknown

In particular, you know that big the big things is make yourself visible as you possibly can. But both personally and from the vehicle's point of view, this to follow the goal with protocols. If you can get off the motorway, if you can get into an emergency refuge by people, that smart motorways absolutely do. But other than that, get yourself left, get yourself at the vehicle and call us.

Unknown

Let us know. Make sure you know where you are. An awful lot of the calls that come into our call centers, we get very, very vague descriptions about where the vehicles are and that we can if we've got no idea where you are, we can cut you on our cameras, we can close lanes, we can get traffic officers out to support all of the appropriate services.

Unknown

But we need to know where you are before we do anything else. What I like about what you've just said there, I remember it very well, that campaign. It was those oversize box on your windscreen follies. That was the flight. I remember it very, very, very visual. So it had a lasting impact on that messaging, regulations and compliance.

Unknown

The powers that you have at national highways, where do you stand here in terms of any penalties or trying to enforce on the network? And do you have any operations or any initiatives in place or in the past that you could mention? We have very, very, very few enforcement powers. We can not if somebody willfully disobeys adult direct instructions, one of our traffic officers, we have a degree of enforcement powers and that is it.

Unknown

And it's an interesting discussion because to be blunt, we don't want enforcement powers. I think the way the traffic officer teams in particular, the way the Maltings interacts with members of the public, interact with the the industry is around a certain degree of trust, but we're not there to score more enforcement points with people. I'm going to be aware your listeners will be well, and, you know, for a lot of the general driving public think our traffic officers are some kind of police force or whatever, but they're not the better help there to support not just the operator drivers and the operators, but also the blue light services as well.

Unknown

I think what we do see is quite a lot of fragmentation across the different police force. It always makes you useful when people talk about the police. There's no such thing as the police in this county. We have 43 forces, all with differing views of the world. Some work together almost, maybe not quite so much. So it can be fragmented I think is probably the best way, as I personally I view the enforcement has a role, but we're never going to enforce bad behaviors of our network until we all have our own personal policeman sitting on our shoulder telling us what to do and what not to do.

Unknown

So for me, it's more about raising awareness across drivers uses of our network as we spoke about it in the presentation, an idea that the force continues today, you can easily demonstrate that at least 50% of the vehicles on the road at any one time of the incident for work. We already have the Health and Safety at Work lever, which can be used to exert influence, change behaviors, encourage correct decision making from drivers because they're driving for work by an employee in the same way as you would if you were sitting in an office or driving a forklift for ground awareness or driving a vehicle on the building.

Unknown

Sort of levers are already there. So enforcement is great to have there as an absolute last resort. But actually an awful lot of it is about encouraging behaviors. And I always tend to refer back to one of the one of the operations, my team, which is the Operation Travel Lobby, which is where we land police forces around the country.

Unknown

One of our three, I see the units over and some specialize in the slightly adapted weekly. The speed limit is a disabled on only because of enforcement vehicles. They don't pursued it. So it's just to allow us to make progress against traffic or police. We lend concerns about traffic. It's probably still got some blue light, but the biggest single modification is set up freedom 60 degree enforcement standard cameras on them as well as you know, GoPros and.

Unknown

All right. So the reason I mention a very good example, one of those dual highways. And I asked a colleague who operates and we saw these comes in less successful and I've got a spreadsheet which told me about all the prosecutions that the police had followed through and fixed penalty notices, additional arrests in the deployment of, say, well, you just demonstrated to me at work because if it was working, we wouldn't find anybody to prosecute, would we?

Unknown

All the police, the finally prosecute. Now another state calling this going a little bit, you know, hypothetical, I guess fall into that phrase that. But the biggest single benefit from law and brings us and this plays back to this very little question is it raises awareness and it shines a light on the fact that there are some fairly unhealthy behaviors going all on network.

Unknown

And this demonstrates and so the detail intersect is massive. The cabs, we get criticized for them being stolen from the editor of the Daily Mail article in the Open is, you know, myself, cell phone, sneaky cuffs. I'll tell everybody where they are 24 hours a day. I want the drivers to be living safely around them, you know, but they're not designed to be sneaky.

Unknown

And on the top of that out there, we do use them in fairly overt manner on occasions. They're there to demonstrate and present a deterrent effect, which an enforcement takes. You use the word behavior. Now, I like it. I like it a lot, but I want to take it back to the point about the drive is well-being and safety.

Unknown

They work long hours, they work irregular hours. The facilities, I suppose, aren't always the best either when they take stops. Is there anything that you're working on at the moment that can help improve that? Because I know there's certain people out there that want this area to certainly improve. And we heard it this morning the conference. But is anything with highways it's doing at the moment, bearing in mind you cover the majority of this network?

Unknown

Yeah, there's a few things, to be honest. It's pretty much at the heart of most things that we're doing at the moment. One of the things that, you know, I talk about and drive my team to distraction with is and I know this sounds maybe a little bit blunt because vehicles don't crash, people crash. I just happened to be in a vehicle at the time.

Unknown

When we look back at the slightly more nine fatal collision database that we maintained, the DFT, we found very, very few collisions which were instigated by vehicle failure. It's virtually always something to do with the driver, but when you start digging into that, we talked quite a lot about what we call for now. There's probably five, which I share with you.

Unknown

We talk about fatigue. Fatigue causes a hell of a lot, crashes, distraction, causes a lot of the crashes, drug impaired, which is a real unknown for us. We expect there's a lot of use of that, but nobody's got any figures on that. We try and get some figures on that, which we'll be able to share with you all for our next six months as a medical conditions plane.

Unknown

And if you imagine those falls of eight milligrams, when you get two or three of us crossing over, that's where that's where you issues really. So it's raising everybody's awareness around that. The fifth one which we aren't always quite brave enough to talk about is attitude. You know, though it's a bit of a bit of a cliche, but definitely, as you said, you know, you don't drive you van or your truck or even your company car in the same way as you probably drove you no vehicle.

Unknown

So what is that? That's all about attitude. You know, I don't know unless I them all delivery driver is, you know, very often done with seatbelts and not to saliva it is I probably wouldn't dream of driving around vehicle without a seatbelt on yet it's perfectly acceptable in that environment and they justify it in all kinds of different ways.

Unknown

So there's a lot going on the road, but there's a lot going on from an awareness point of view, trying to get that message across. One of the things that we talk about again internally quite a lot, I don't quite see in the light of day externally yet is fairly mild. It's the human factor that tends to cause the collisions in the first place.

Unknown

Fleets are really good at managing Vehicle Roadworthiness. They're not that great at managing Driver Roadworthiness in my opinion, in my experience, and I think there's a reason for that that you know, the traffic officer, the traffic commission is rather devious. I do load work. That vehicle condition must drive. But most things about vehicle condition are binary. You even would have allowed it would you like see the lead work or didn't you had a look tread on your tires or they didn't.

Unknown

So it's not a difficult conversation. It's not a difficult thing to say to a driver, Can you just go and check your lights on that vehicle and it looks heavy to me. Or if you check your lights this morning, that's quite a simple conversation to initiate. Looking at your driver who looks like an absolute caricature of a hole to take a boat to happen at night, you were on it.

Unknown

You know, that's going to be a difficult conversation, you know, before you bleed. You're only even off the shoulder to you, Monty. You're going to have the union involved. It's a really difficult conversation, but it shouldn't be because that's the causation. And as an industry, it almost conspires against us. So we talk about HGV drivers. No, it's not limited to I see these buttons and I see they go it and I'm going to, with my tongue firmly my cheek and talk about a few stereotypes.

Unknown

But most I see they go the blokes blokes don't like don't the doctors. We know that. But when you do take yourself out and say, I'm having a lot of trouble sleeping off, although if I've got sleep up here or you know, keep falling asleep and you get diagnosed as diabetic or whatever happens to be was 30, first thing that I think is the very first thing that happens is you get your license suspended.

Unknown

So where's the alongside incentive? That's probably the wrong word, but where's the imperative for you to actually grasp the issue as a driver and seek help and advice on it? It's a really difficult one to crack, but we do a lot of work behind the scenes on this. Just a day for you. If you listen as 21st of March, you'll get lucky enough, 21st in March, we will have big events on the National Space Center in Leicester, which is addressing these kind of issues, and then there'll be limited availability.

Unknown

We really want to engage with health and safety and wellbeing individuals within organizations. With respect to fleet managers, this isn't about managing the metal and protecting residual values and all that good stuff. This is about managing this as a health and safety and wellbeing issue for the benefit of everybody involved. So watch this space fit me up on legal team.

Unknown

Have a look about the bullet. You know, it's a first come first serve that's got the under 13 dog. Well notice we will put that on the link at the bottom of the podcast. I was suddenly bit I knew last year it was oversubscribed. You had like a room in the background that you had to go into. So yes, we will certainly help promote that for you.

Unknown

Just taking things a little bit further from the shores now of the UK, obviously the roads here are not just shared by people from this country. There's a lot of international freight with that. You've touched upon the word attitude. Let me bring into place where the word culture, attitude and culture play out together. Is there any work going on at the moment with the UK and other countries about this and road safety?

Unknown

So that's an interesting question and it's fraught with challenges, to be perfectly honest. There are a couple of things we've been doing which have we we think are successful. And also I think I should be probably a little bit more confident. That is that one of the big challenges we have across most of the things that we do is we're trying to demonstrate that something didn't happen.

Unknown

A handsome education, some of you didn't crash. That's quite a difficult thing to do, as I'm sure your listeners will appreciate. We've the incoming vehicles. For a number of years now, we've been offering Fresnel lenses and point of entry on the left hand drive. I see these. We've burnt our way through quite a few thousand of those over the last four or five years.

Unknown

You do they work. I haven't got a clue. But what I do now is we see significantly less left hand drive side slope collisions. And when I see four or five years ago saw something that's happened, what we've also been doing for the last couple of years, we've created what we call ideology leaflet and the risk of saying to the simplistic what is trying to do is just give us some knowledge to incoming drivers about the fact that guess what, we drive on the other side of a road, our speed limit three miles an hour.

Unknown

We've got these strange people are good, obstructive, lovely people call traffic officers around, but they're not the police. But actually they do have powers in the there to help and support. We have these things called small motorways, which we probably need to explain to you how value work and what an emergency refuge really is about the thousands at the site of know.

Unknown

So a nice leaflet, very illustrative in the way that we trying to get the message across. But we've also translated it into I think it's 16 different languages, so we have hard copies available on the common languages at the point of entry and the various HGV parking spots within kind of a for a range of ports. And we also have online copies in all kinds of different languages.

Unknown

One of the things that, well, I guess is a few things, a little sad, a little bit frivolously does make me smile. Every time I think about it, we learn that you give somebody a paragraph in German and it comes back you what looks like an exercise. So individual feet, in the words of a page, but that available online that has to be used.

Unknown

And we think that a useful thing we discovered a secondary office as well which was interesting, which was UK based individuals where English isn't the first language. So we supported Amazon, for example, significantly. And so you will find all delivery providers in providing advice in various Eastern European languages, often making up the bulk of our workforce. So it's a tool in terms of broadening management.

Unknown

It is a bit difficult to actually follow following parallel organizations. National Highways I'm sorry, UK, we are heavily involved. The Cedar City deal, which is the European grouping of of highways, agencies, highways, authorities, where we share the knowledge, where we learned stuff and then stuff from us. Part of our general really needs is highways, part of military means.

Unknown

We do engage on the international basis with where the links appear. Basically, we're very much about knowledge sharing and getting the messages out. For example, some of your listeners might be aware of the project, which following at the moment Project Ping, which is about trying to let opted in operators. Now what we've spotted their vehicles up to when they're in the corner and out of sight without resort to enforcement.

Unknown

It's a heads up sorted out called new approach for it is working really really well but we've got two or three conversations with foreign bodies around how they can adopt you idea of interested in a big city project coming over to look at the build out of that. So it is interesting. We do get various linkages that we're happy to share what's around the corner in terms of any future advancements with the national highways at the moment, whether it's technology based, I'll give you the example.

Unknown

We talk about autonomous vehicles and everyone's got a different viewpoint on that as to when they're going to arrive in numbers. Can I mention that word as well? Smart road infrastructure. So where are we on some of these things? And we are in the right direction and is our HealthKit? Yeah, I guess it is, to be honest. I mean the the march towards autonomous and ultimately through those holidays I'm afraid you're going to be alternately fueled vehicles is inexorable you know it's coming whether we like it or not.

Unknown

So the reasons that I mentioned earlier, a hell of a lot of activity going on behind the scenes with a tech teams, the highways to make sure our infrastructure is fit and enhanced, not movement. I guess the biggest thing for me, though, it's not for me, it's not particularly about technology coming out of shift. For me, it's all about people and one of things we we're working on very hard and it it's not the greatest name for a project, but bear with me, Supreme Court and Power procurement.

Unknown

We're all sharing the realms with people who drive for work. We talk about this earlier, but it's so easy for us to say, well, that was that was one of our contractors or that was somebody work, but that we were looking for somebody. That's the whole point of this And what we're calling on specifiers to to be more conscious of is the ability and the responsibility to influence behaviors within their supply chains.

Unknown

The conversation this morning, Richard Turkey, the senior traffic commissioner, mentioned the the bus tipper tragedy eight years ago. And I call it if you believe this eight years ago. And it was very easy just to point the finger at that operator and say your system, the procedures, vehicle maintenance, weren't up to scratch. That's why you have it. And now driving about Tipper, that business won't just drive in that particular line.

Unknown

The streets of the bus that are full of it. They were driving it around in the streets above because they were working for somebody to carry the roll that they were doing. So where was the confidence in that? Specify who was employing that vehicle in order to carry out the job that they were doing it properly? You wouldn't let them in to rewire your house or plumbing gasoline or anything like that.

Unknown

We've had to had a confidence that they were up to the job. Yet somewhere along the lines, we just make this assumption that the organization is up to the job and we need to be more demanding as specify is we need to be more demanding as members of the population to be perfectly honest as well. Look, I see what I question about the gig economy, because the guy on the bus, the question another pizza delivered on the back of a very shaky looking moped, which I think was probably filled in there for protection.

Unknown

You got a choice. If you are not happy with the way that the service was provided for you, stop using it. Tell me why you stopped using it and encourage them to stay put. Because we get what we pay for, what we deserve. To a great extent that would be my message is we need to be more demanding.

Unknown

If we can do anything seriously about road safety, the specifiers as users and as consumers, we need to be more demanding.

Unknown

That was Mark Cartwright from National Highways talking to Darren Lindsey, and it brings this week's podcast episode to an end. Do you like it? Download it, share it, and tell your friends and colleagues about it. You'll find this and other episodes via the project Head with website and on all the popular podcast platforms.

Unknown

Next week we'll be exploring the role of the coroner in the safe system. But for now, from me, James Luckhurst and the reporter Darren Lindsey. It's goodbye.