Horizon explores: Health and Safety
Telematics take-up encouraged to save lives
With occupational road risk on the rise, there’s a greater need across the industry for tech that helps protect its travelling workforce.
Jasmin CollierEditorial Content Manager, RSSB
Imagine being able to track all speeding instances, collisions, and dashboard warnings on your road vehicles. And monitor fuel expenditure against fleet mileage. And even keep on top of your road vehicles’ emissions.
With safety, cost efficiencies, and sustainability top of mind for many rail organisations, telematics could bring real benefits. Telematics can monitor road vehicles by using GPS technology and on-board diagnostics. Some rail businesses—including Vital Rail and RSS Infrastructure—are already using telematics to capture vehicle risk data, and they’re gaining a better understanding of their actual risk elements rather than relying on perceived risk.
In 2020, CIRAS sat down with representatives from these organisations to learn how they were benefitting from telematics. While there was some early resistance to the technology among rail workers, there were plenty of eventual benefits. These included fewer incidents, quicker response times to accidents, and higher feelings of assurance among staff that they would not be blamed for an incident that wasn’t their fault.
Until industry at large adopts a system like this, however, road risk data is going to be established in a piecemeal manner and reveal only a patchwork picture of occupational road risk. The large-scale uptake of a technology like this depends on industry’s collective understanding and appreciation of it.
To that end, RSSB has recently launched a survey to discover what data rail companies are capturing via telematics and how they’re using it to drive down road vehicle risk. It’s hoped that this would ultimately lead to the introduction of industry-level risk monitoring.
It could help protect drivers from the impacts of fatigue by monitoring things like their reaction times and state of alertness.
It could reduce fuel spend by improving driving habits and encouraging less idling.
It could help organisations respond to incidents more quickly by frequently pinging location data.
It could reduce at-fault collisions (and their associated costs) by helping drivers understand any risky behavioural trends they have.
Now is a good time for this effort. In the decade between 2009 and 2019, road traffic accidents were the leading cause of death among staff in the rail industry. Ten of the 20 fatalities during this time were due to work-related road incidents. And in 2022/2023, a further two railway workers died on the road.
It’s statistics like these that are driving Road Risk Group (RRG) efforts. As well as supporting the telematics project, the cross-industry RRG is developing a Risk Management Maturity Model Evidence Matrix to measure the effectiveness and maturity of the sector’s initiatives in road risk management. They’re also consulting with the Safety Management Intelligence System Advisory Group to enhance the reliability of road risk safety performance data.
We will maximise the potential for cooperation and collaboration across industry sector groups […] and create opportunities to improve reporting and analysis.
Although meaningful work is now being done in this important area, the rail industry can’t afford to get complacent. It’s time to consider what more can be done to encourage safer driving. And while technology like telematics can provide an insight into driving behaviours and overall fleet health, it’s going to take industry-wide collaboration to reduce occupational road risk.
How does your organisation collect road risk data, and how do you use it? Your feedback will help us better protect rail workers on the road.
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