Recently, for the first time in a long time, I was lucky enough to enjoy an extended time away from work and on leave so, with my partner and dog in tow, I clambered into the car and made the road trip from Melbourne to the Sunshine Coast.
This is not the first time I have made this drive, and it certainly won’t be the last. On the way to Queensland I, out of habit, took the coastal route – but on the way home the promise of cheap accommodation in Dubbo and a chance for a change of scenery motivated me to drive inland and through some of the farming heartland of Australia’s eastern states.
Although the inland drive added a couple of hours onto the overall journey, it was, largely, an enjoyable one. It was a pleasure to see all manner of heavy vehicles taking all sorts of oversized loads around the region. If anything, it was a stark reminder of how our truck drivers help keep Australia moving.
There was one part of the drive, however, that stood out to me – and that was the quality of the single-carriageway roads that snaked through my route.
And, when I say quality, I mean lack thereof.
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The pothole strewn roads, broken, gravel shoulders and narrow lanes were all too common driving back to Melbourne and, at one point to avoid a large, dead kangaroo on the road I was forced to hit a pothole so deep that it felt like my soul left my body, and it made me audibly apologise to the suspension on trusty my Volkswagen Golf wagon.
The result of the drive? A busted wheel bearing that I swear was broken by the pothole in question somewhere down the Newell Highway.
Now, that’s not a major issue in the larger scheme of things. We made it home safely and repaired the car relatively easily, but upon reflection those issues become larger when they become a workplace safety issue – like they are for our truck drivers.
Encountering those potholes, broken shoulders and narrow roads is more than a daily occurrence for so many heavy vehicle drivers – and more than once did I catch myself watching two oversize loads inch past each other in my rearview mirror on the narrow, regional thoroughfares.
It’s even more fitting, then, that these thoughts came to me during the month of October which, incidentally, is National Safe Work Month, and former traffic cop and current specialist trainer in driver safety for Teletrac Navman Chris L’Elcuse shared my view of the state of some of Australia’s roads.
“What we find in remote locations is the highways are most often frequented by heavy vehicles because they’re trying to bypass the majority of that social traffic,” L’Ecluse tells ATN.
“But, let’s face it, these are glorified goat tracks. The maintenance of these roads is substandard in a large way and often they’re very narrow, the shoulders are broken, and the engineering is basically just paving over those tracks the farmers used to use.
“They’re certainly not fit for purpose, for the size, weight and volume of heavy traffic that uses these roads.
“The result isn’t just damaged vehicles because of the stress being placed on tyres, suspension, brakes, steering components, et cetera, but when you take that pothole you hit and multiply it by 1000s of kilometres, that’s what the truck drivers are dealing with.
“Yes, they have air seats, but the reality is there is still a shock that permeates through the body.
“From a workplace health and safety perspective there’s a phenomenon called shock and vibration. That usually relates to work crews that are using things like jackhammers, but the shock and vibration that comes through the driver’s seat of a truck is very real and has a detrimental effect.
“Compound that with the fact we have an aging pool of drivers, I don’t think the politicians fully understand the toll it takes on both the equipment and drivers of heavy vehicles.”
The impact of the road quality issues, aside from the obvious safety concerns, go far deeper than what it may seem at the surface.
As Australia’s freight demand increases, the pressure on road transport rises. As a result, added stress is being placed on an industry that is already crying out for more professionals.
More freight demand means more trucks on the road, more trucks on the road means more damage to the road, more damage to the road means a higher maintenance cost to existing trucks. It’s a vicious cycle.
That increased freight demand, L’Elcuse says, continues to add further pressures to drivers to hit deadlines and get the job done, which in itself is not pertinent to improving road safety outcomes – and it’s an issue that is only exacerbated by the diminishing road quality.
“Drivers are caught between a rock and a hard place,” L’Ecluse continues. “Despite the fact we’ve got these chain of responsibility laws – which are aimed at the organisers who control the activity, not the drivers – drivers still feel the pressure.
“On one hand they have a requirement to deliver the goods within a timeframe and push every minute they can, but to do that on roads that are substandard makes the job difficult.
“That pushing can then impact mental health outcomes, job enjoyment, and it why we’re having trouble attracting young people to our industry, because it’s hard. It’s an industry that’s known to be hard on various levels.
“Then, on top of it all, there’s the added mental stress of ensuring they don’t compromise their compliance while pushing every minute they can.
“This is where technology like our telematics can come in, to help take a bit of that mental stress away and allow drivers to focus on driving rather than thinking about all the compliance measures.
“There are rule sets which are very, very strict. But that’s the intent of our technology, to make the driver’s life easier. If we can reduce some of that mental load, we can stave off the impacts of fatigue.”
In reality, that’s what so much of long-haul driving comes back to. Fatigue. What I know is a day driving on a pothole-riddled single-carriageway left feeling more drained than a day cruising on a smooth, low-traffic dual-carriageway.
When driving long-haul routes fatigue is inevitable, and its non-binary.
L’Ecluse says he would like to see the next batch of fatigue technology tap into each individual driver’s biological cadence to ensure safer outcomes for all drivers.
“The current rule sets are binary,” he says. “If you drive for ‘x’ number of hours, you have to rest for ‘y’ amount of time.
“In that timeframe a driver may become fatigued, but the ruleset allows them to keep driving. My concern is if you’re at the end of a seven-day run the collective pressures of fatigue pile up and suddenly you can’t make your timeframe without falling asleep.
“Currently there’s a gap, and that’s where I think the technology is heading, it will be integrated to monitor the individual body.
“Years ago, we did a national fatigue hack in Canberra where we invited brains trusts from various industries around the world to demonstrate what they think can assist in helping combat fatigue, and the winner was a really interesting idea that came from a group of medical specialists using ECGs.
“Now, most drivers wouldn’t be comfortable if you had to hook them up to an ECG, but they devised a situation where they could implant their ECG into the rim of the steering wheel, so as the driver was holding it their vitals were monitored.
“A driver can’t drive without holding a steering wheel. It would monitor oxygen in the blood, heart rate, breathing, cadence, all the really vital statistics for combatting fatigue.
“It’s going to take a long journey to for the technology to get there, but in my mind, it has to go to a place where it’s not about stopping drivers when they’re fatigued, it’s about technology highlighting ways to stop fatigue debt creeping into driving.
“There’s going to be pushback from drivers, I know if I told you when you drove back from Queensland you had to stop for 15 minutes every two hours you would say ‘I’m not feeling fatigued’.
“But physiologically you’re building up that fatigue debt and eventually that will catch up with you. Yes, you get to your destination a little bit later, but it doesn’t allow you to do so dangerously.”
“Management plans do not consider when you are fatigued, it simply considers what the rule sets allow you to do and forces you to push to the limit of what the rules allow.
“But people are unique, every person is an individual and fatigue affects people differently.
“The physical and mental pressures that are applied to drivers can make for a really uncomfortable work environment, and it’s up to everyone to limit that as much as possible.”
Read more ATN:
The Future of Trucking: Outlining Australian trends
Rising freight costs blamed for trimmed profits
Penske partnership part of Toll $200 million fleet refresh