What do regulators need to know about heavy truck crashes?

Professor Kim Hassall has broken down what operators and drivers need to know about the heavy truck crash statistics in Australia. Some of the results may be a great surprise.

Australia is justifiably concerned each year about the national road toll.

In 2021, heavy trucks were involved in 163 fatalities, of which usually about 80 per cent are not the fault of the heavy vehicle. Our national truck fatals database does not allocate fault to the heavy truck or the lighter vehicle, however, across the ditch, New Zealand does do this attribution.

In overall terms, the number of truck related fatal crashes compared to total major heavy vehicle crashes is about 3.6 per cent of observed major crashes.

It is estimated that the ‘hire and reward’ truck sector are involved in some 3000 major crashes per annum and the ‘ancillary’ sector, based on significantly lower kilometres undertaken, boosts this number of major crashes up to some 4000 to 4500 major crashes per annum.

It is not well known that the ancillary sector, which is not dependent on freight rates, is some 58 per cent of the total heavy vehicle fleet population in Australia. There is no specific trucking association that represents this 58 per cent ancillary trucking sector.

Police reports possible only cover some 30 per cent of the estimated major crashes and this may be an upper estimate. Basically, the research effort examining the large number of major crashes really falls to non-government agencies. Even just delving into the ‘hire and reward’ major crashes shows that the policy and regulatory implications are very significant.

Heavy Truck Crash Rates – 2009 to 2019

The following table, to be published later in 2023, presents the heavy truck major crash rates for conventional and PBS vehicles. These rates are not necessarily related to fatalities but insurance claims greater than $50,000 per incident.

Table 1

Source: Austroads 2014, NTC 2017, NHVR 2021, and Pers Comms, Fleet Survey 2021, 2. 2022/2023 Quad Road train survey WA

The light and medium, non-trailer coupled and rigid vehicle data was drawn from surveys undertaken in the past 12 months, as were the conventional quad road train results, which came from a North West WA survey of heavy tow operators and insurers.

Table 1 reflects the major heavy vehicle crash rates of the largest of the heavy truck configurations in Australia. As can be seen, the Higher Productivity Vehicles in the PBS scheme are performing particularly well. The data for this analysis were drawn from three national PBS safety studies and supplemented by more recent surveys for the light and medium rigid truck classes and the conventional quad road train sector.

The good the bad and the ugly

In Australia the B-Double was effectively a PBS vehicle ahead of its time – bigger proved to be safer than its semi-trailer counterpart.

As much as some jurisdictions were tentative about the triple combination, the B coupled B-Triple was effectively the safest heavy truck combination on Australian roads for many years. However, a new hero has emerged in the past few years, that being the 20-metre semitrailer with a quad axle trailer. This combination is gaining significant use with the delivery of supermarket products to regional areas.

Perhaps not the elephant in the crash room, but the megalodon in the fish bowl is the performance of the conventional quad road train configurations.

At this time the non-PBS road trains, from the survey sample of 440 northern WA quad road trains, reflects almost three times greater crash frequencies than for even conventional triple road trains.

At this time the reasons may relate to both driver training and the road infrastructure, especially road width up north. Also having a multi-combination licence that spans a conventional B-Double licence to a quad road train licence in the same class may deserve future jurisdictional attention. The Northern Territory and North Queensland’s quad road train crash frequencies are lower than WA’s, but that is because of the lower number of these vehicles operating in NT and Queensland.

These ‘major’ heavy vehicle truck crashes may not result in the majority of fatal outcomes, but the frequency deserves regulator attention when there could be some 4500 such incidents per annum in Australia across all configurations.

Surely just having a focus on the 163 truck-related fatals is not giving an appropriate focus to the entire national heavy vehicle crash problem across the entire industry.