SWOV is often asked the question of how many casualties there are each year in collisions with an opened lorry tailboard. This was the reason to determine the size of this problem, and to simultaneously examine what could be done to improve safety. Casualties as a result of collisions with tailboards cannot be distinguished in the national road casualty registration. That is why this study used the Injury Surveillance System 'LIS' of the Consumer Safety Institute. The LIS database contains casualty details of domestic, sport, industrial, and traffic accidents. The casualties are those who have reported for treatment at the Accident & Emergency (A&E) department of a hospital. It appears that in the Netherlands, there is an annual average of 20 pedestrians and 30 other road users (cyclists, mopedists, and lightmopedists) who report at an A&E department after a collision with an opened tailboard. These numbers are relatively small compared with other categories of accidents with tailboards. There are, annually, more than 800 casualties of industrial accidents and about 200 domestic accidents (moving house oneself, etc.). There are European Union requirements that tailboards have to comply with. The more general requirements (an EU machine guideline, including tailboards) include, for example, avoiding sharp edges and corners. The EU machine guideline covers the labour-related risk, and not the danger for third parties such as road users. A CEN norm for tailboards does pay attention to road users via requirements of the signalling: an opened tailboard must be visible from all sides at night as well as during the daytime. Examples of signalling devices are: lights, reflecting flags, and reflecting stickers. According to current practice, the obligatory annual testing of tailboards only ensures that lights ór flags are installed. It is also current practice that signalling is not usually visible from the side. A (sustainable) signalling of the tailboard is a problem because they are used so intensively. SWOV challenges the industry to apply innovative techniques that can contribute to a safer and more sustainable design of the tailboard. Furthermore, SWOV recommends that the design and testing requirements are made stricter.
Abstract