This paper analyses road traffic crashes involving heavy trucks, highlighting characteristics such as severity, location, temporality and type of crash. A brief introduction to the regulatory environment and statistical summaries of Australia’s heavy vehicle fleet are also provided. In this paper a ‘heavy truck’ is a motor vehicle designed for the carriage of freight, with a gross vehicle mass (GVM) of 4.5 tonnes or over. Included are rigid trucks with/without trailers, and prime movers with/without trailers (‘articulated’ trucks). Bus involvement is excluded. It has not been possible to disaggregate national crash data into configuration types beyond ‘articulated’ and ‘rigid’. The scope of the crash analysis is fatal and injury road traffic crashes. National counts of injury crashes are summations across all injury severities as provided by the states and territories. Hospitalisation data (counts of admissions) is also included where possible. The content of the paper is structured as follows: firstly a brief description of the regulatory environment is provided outlining the roles of the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator and the State and Territory authorities. This is followed by a discussion of issues identified in recent literature on heavy truck safety. Next is the analysis of crash data including: an overview; crash characteristics; demographics and fault focussing on the last ten years or the latest data available. Lastly Australia’s heavy vehicle fleet is summarised and crash rates presented. (Author/publisher)
Abstract