Our roads are a lifeline, but they’re also a risky place to work.
Every day and night, thousands of road workers across Australia face the reality of a high-risk working environment. Speeding vehicles, verbal and physical abuse, and non-compliance with warning signs, unnecessarily increase risks to road workers who deserve the same right to get home safely as every Australian.
Statistics paint a grim picture. Research shows that work zones experience 18 fatal crashes and 245 serious injuries annually – and the figures are widely believed to be significantly underreported, with less severe injuries and near misses frequently going unreported.
Current regulatory and legislative frameworks, while well-intentioned, often fall short in prioritising safer practices that better protect workers.
The toll on individuals, families, and communities is immeasurable. Yet, the problem persists, fuelled by inadequate safety training, poor compliance with traffic regulations, and a lack of investment in innovative safety solutions, including automated enforcement.
Our opportunity as an industry to collaborate with government, is to raise the bar on safety by going beyond minimum safety standards and to ensure that road work site design to protect worker safety is not compromised by being contested in business cases or during tender evaluations.
By creating an environment supporting innovative and best-practice safety standards and learning from peer countries overseas that have significantly reduced risks at worksites, we can make a difference.
Protecting life, increasing productivity and improving sustainability with Workzone Digitisation
Altus Traffic’s Head of Digital, Beth Lilford, outlines how Workzone Digitisation leverages innovative sensors and smart software to convert information on the performance of resources into a continuous, automated and actionable monitoring system.
The system blends technology, strategy and sustainability and helps observers to act on issues flagged by the system. It helps us reimagine what’s possible for traffic management – one smart cone, sensor and site at a time.
Read the article here
Honouring our highway heroes
Every Australian worker deserves to get home safely at the end of their day.
But that isn’t the case for dozens of Australian roadworkers each year, who suffer serious – sometimes critical – injuries while doing their jobs improving our road network.
As part of 2024 Road Worker Day of Remembrance, Peter Frazer OAM encourages all of us to do our part and improve safety conditions for our road workers.
Read the article here
