There’s no profession that rides Australia’s rural roads quite like our truck drivers. The nation’s long-haul truckies are crucial for keeping the country moving, but they’re also one of the most at-risk population groups when it comes to serious accidents on our rural and remote roads.
In 2023 rural and remote roads accounted for almost two thirds of Australia’s total road death toll of 1266 people. Despite best efforts almost a year on, 2024 is on track to become the deadliest year on Australian roads in half-a-decade.
That’s why the upcoming Australian Rural Road Safety Month is so important, as it is now more crucial than ever that proper awareness of the additional risks encountered while driving on remote and rural roads across the country is raised across organisations and industries.
Chris L’Ecluse was a 20-year career police officer in Western Australia before shifting across to the road safety landscape. Now, the former highway patrolman, police driving instructor and rural patrolman holds the title of Solution Specialist of Safety at telematics giant Teletrac Navman.
L’Ecluse has a rare perspective of rural road incidents. As a safety specialist he’s striving to ensure greater road safety outcomes for heavy vehicle operators across the country, while as a cop he encountered those flouting road safety rules and saw the disastrous outcomes of crashes and collisions in rural areas.
He tells ATN the risk factors for crashes and collisions on rural and remote roads are considerably different than those in regional areas, but those risk factors see the potential for fatal incidents soar.
“For many years when I issued infringement notices to drivers of every denomination, race, age, gender, almost universally no driver thought they were bad at driving,” L’Ecluse says. “Yet the statistics laid bare that they were.”
“There’s almost no such thing as a perfect driver, and certainly no one is perfect all the time. What we inherently do is justify our poor behaviours through various means. ‘It’s ok to drive 10 km/h over the speed limit because everyone is doing it’, or ‘I believe I’m capable of managing this speed’.
“Rural roads are, statistically, much more dangerous than suburban or city roads. It’s not necessarily the number of collisions. Statistically, the frequency of collisions is higher in more densely populated areas, but the majority of those collisions occur at intersections and, because people are often stopped or travelling at slow speeds, notwithstanding the anomalies these result in minor to moderate damage and minor to moderate injury.
“In rural settings we have far fewer vehicles, a great deal less light, and the incidence of wildlife. You have narrower roads, often winding, that decrease sight lines.
“When you’ve got greater sight lines, as in the city with a lot of urban light, you can often see or anticipate anomalies quicker, but out on the rural roads, when a kangaroo or a cow or camel comes into the road and you’re coming around a bend, the natural human instinct is to avoid a collision.
“We don’t have time to put conscious thought to that. Our natural instinct is to distance ourselves from the threat, which means often swerving. Because the roadways are narrower, the shoulders are often in disrepair, and we’ve got gravel beside the shoulders, we’re often mixing that with heightened velocity.
“When you take a vehicle off the hard, sealed surface onto an unsealed surface at speed and then introduce lateral forces such as swerving, you’ve got a vehicle that’s out of control and often, the only thing that stops that vehicle is the tree on the side of the road.”
For all the differences in risk factors between metropolitan and rural road-users, there is one that continues to be the bane of road safety across the country, the use of mobile phones while driving.
Whether it be a flick of the eyes to check a notification or a maps app, or a more concentrated head movement to read and respond to text messages or emails, the second a driver’s eye comes off the road, the risk of collision dramatically climbs.
Mobile usage, in itself, presents potentially different risks when driving on rural roads compared to metropolitan. Risks, L’Elcuse says, that can often come back to poor fatigue management.
“The danger in regional and rural roads of being distracted, be it by a phone or by anything, is anytime you take your eyes off the road,” L’Ecluse asserts.
“The way our eyes work, we’ve got two types of vision. We’ve got centrally focused vision, and then we’ve got peripheral vision. What happens is we use our periphery to identify movement, and then once our periphery identifies the movement, we turn our focused vision, train it on that issue, and then we get clarity.
“The problem with that occurring in the rural environments is we can’t depend on our peripheral vision as much because there’s no light to then be able to see the movement that attracts our focused vision.
“Anytime you use a mobile phone, it’s dangerous. Why it’s dangerous in the city is because you’ve got a lot more traffic and a lot more moving pieces. The danger in the rural environments is, number one, people can be attracted to using their phones for any number of reasons without generally the fear of being caught, because you’re going to see police vehicle out those environments. There’s very few of those downward facing cameras in those rural environments.
“People look at that risk versus reward perspective.
“People driving for a long distance or a long time without that visual stimulus, they look for other means of stimulating themselves to prevent this is what they say to themselves, prevent the onset of fatigue or other issues. So, they start using their phone.
“Of course, they’re now looking at something that is distracting them from the primary course of driving or safely driving the vehicle. The minute that environment changes, it could be something like wildlife or heavy vehicle approaching from the other direction, the roadway is much narrower, and obviously it’s often winding.
“It doesn’t take long before you find yourself off that shoulder and at those sort of speeds. The minute you hit the gravel, you can’t control it, and often what happens is people over correct they hit the black top, they get what’s called a ‘tank slapper’, so the rear end shut shimmies both ways, and then they start spinning.
“Once you spin, you’ve got no control.”
How, then, can this root cause of fatigue be managed? After all, it’s not a conscious decision to be tired like it is to drink and drive or use your phone while driving. Becoming fatigued extends beyond the act of driving or spending time on the road – it’s part of being human.
This is where a combination of telematics and self-awareness of your own fatigue signs and shortcomings can come in to reduce those collision risks.
“Fatigue is a natural phenomenon,” L’Ecluse says. “We can criticise people for drinking and driving because they’ve made that conscious decision to consume that drink and get behind the wheel.
“We all don’t get drunk and get behind the wheel, but we all get fatigued. It’s a matter of helping people and educating people about the common signs of fatigue.
“It has to be workable. We can’t stop a b-double in the middle of nowhere every two hours, because they take quite some time to get going again. But we want people to understand what the warning signs of fatigue look like. Things like elevated blinking rates, when the head nods when yawning.
“If you’re winding the window down to get some fresh air or shuffling around trying to get comfortable in your seat, those are signs of fatigue.
“Then, various telematics providers are chosen for whatever reason. We’ve had cameras that focus on the eyes to see if the driver was fatigued, we’ve had some that buzz the steering wheel or the seat or make audible dings.
“We’ve seen operators with multiple layers of technology in the cab.
“Now, because we’ve got the cameras, we can identify so many more issues that are relevant to the safe operation of vehicles, but all under one umbrella.
“There are metrics and telematics recorded for speed, distance, location, over speeding, harsh braking, harsh cornering, and new metrics like following too close – which in the heavy vehicle industry is a real issue.
“We can identify street-level speed limits, where the camera identifies the speed limit because it’s captured the footage of a speed sign, we now know empirically that the speed zone for that area is ‘x’, and that vehicle is now either speeding or not speeding.
“If the driver has missed a speed sign because they’re drowsy, distracted, or whatever the case may be, the camera can often identify that and then issue an audible warning over the system to advise or coach in real time better behaviours from that driver to say, ‘caution, over speeding’ or ‘caution, distracted driving.
“If the driver’s got their head down, the camera will identify that, because we’ve got the mapping data, we can discern between a stop sign and a giveaway sign.
“So, if a driver fails to stop at a stop sign, which is a fairly big issue, then it can identify that and not only record that, but help the driver understand in real time.”
All these safety metrics, these buzzes and audible dings, have been cited by Australian Trucking Association (ATA) CEO Mark Parry as adding to the distractions of drivers.
“The growing number of alerts from in-cab technology is also a distraction issue,” Parry recently stated,
“Drivers need alerts that are urgent and important – such as warnings about drowsiness or lane keeping – but don’t need unimportant alerts while they are focused on driving.”
L’Ecluse’s response to hearing of Parry’s comments was short in summation.
“Not only are we letting the driver know, but I would also counter that if it is distracting that the camera is letting you know that you’re driving through a red light or a stop sign, then I would argue you should not be on the road.”
Australian Rural Road Safety Month kicks off in September this year. 2024 will be the seventh iteration of the campaign.
It urges all road users to get involved in reducing the nation’s rural road toll, and to be the change they want to see on the roads.
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