Conversations to help you manage driver safety.
A podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles, and want to reduce work-related road risk in their organisation. Resources to help ensure your Driving for Work Policy is up to date and follows best practice.
drivingforbetterbusiness.com
Episodes
Thursday Sep 09, 2021
Thursday Sep 09, 2021
Show notes
In this episode of Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, Simon Turner discusses the thorny issue of driver distraction with Dr Gemma Briggs from the Open University.
Gemma is an applied cognitive psychologist who has been researching driver inattention for over 15 years. She has lectured and written extensively on the attentional and perceptual issues caused by phone use when driving and has worked closely with several road safety charities to promote and share research findings.
Gemma and Simon discuss why a driver on the phone will suffer from 'inattention blindness'
What does the science say about our ability to multitask and take a call whilst driving
They look at the shared responsibility between employers and drivers, and their social responsibility to other road users, and discuss how management can often undermine the whole process.
Finally they look at some of the free resources that are available to help employers and drivers to understand and combat distracted driving
https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/driver-distraction-the-inconvenient-truth/
Useful Links
Driving for Better Business Resources on driver distraction and using mobile phones while driving
Search Results - Driving for Better Business
Driving change website: https://drivingchange.webflow.io/
Can you count the cars challenge: https://youtu.be/XRXdmmTk32I
The mobile office challenge: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/health-sports-psychology/psychology/are-you-driven-distraction
Video on distracted driving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzYAOOyVp7w&list=PLiUzMkrWK6CuyHzDV2ShdYEQgBYNC1N3B&index=2&t=8s this was linked to a brainteaser task (see attached) where people are asked to rate the behaviours in order of danger when driving.
The Inconvenient Truth About Mobile Phone Distraction: Understanding the Means, Motive and Opportunity for Driver Resistance to Legal and Safety Messages: https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bjc/azab038/6262317?login=true
Transcript
Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk – a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles, and want to reduce road risk in their organisation. I’m Simon Turner, and I’m the campaign manager for Driving for Better Business. In this episode, we’re going to discuss the thorny issue of driver distraction with Dr Gemma Briggs from the Open University. Gemma is an applied cognitive psychologist who has been researching driver inattention for over 15 years. She’s lectured and written extensively on the attentional and perceptual issues caused by phone use when driving, and has worked closely with several road safety charities to promote and share her research findings. Gemma and I are going to discuss why a driver on the phone will suffer from inattention blindness; what the science says about our ability to multitask and take a call while driving; we look at the shared responsibility between employers and drivers, and their social responsibility to other road users; and we also discuss how management can very often undermine the whole process. And finally, we look at some of the free resources that are available to help employers and drivers understand and combat distracted driving.
(transition)
Simon: Hi Gemma, and welcome to the podcast!
Gemma: Hi! Thanks for having me.
Simon: So Gemma, perhaps you could start by just telling us a little bit more about the type of research that you do.
Gemma: Sure. I’m a cognitive psychologist, and predominantly I’m really interested in how people pay attention, and how they perceive dynamic and changing scenes. The biggest application of that theoretical basis for me is looking at mobile phone use by drivers, so I’m really interested in what happens within a driver’s brain while they engage in a secondary task, such as having a conversation on the phone. I’m interested in what they do with their attention – do they try to divide their attention? Now research has looked into whether that’s actually possible or not – or whether – more likely perhaps – they shift their attention between those two tasks, and what that means for their performance in both tasks. How does their driving performance deteriorate? How does their performance in the phone conversation cope? How well do they cope with that situation – and what do they get out of it? What we’ve been able to share, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in more detail later anyway, is that it’s a really big problem in terms of driving performance. When we try to divide or shift our attention in this way, we can come unstuck.
Simon: Yeah. I doubt there’s anyone listening to this who doesn’t know that using a handheld phone while driving is illegal, but using a hands-free phone is legal. The implication of that for many is that hands-free is safe – or it wouldn’t be legal. So is it safer? What does your research show?
Gemma: Sure. So in research terms – it’s certainly not just my research or my collaborative research that’s looked into this – but what we do know is that hands-free phone use offers no safety benefit over handheld phones. So regardless of whether you’re physically holding your phone or not, you’re 4 times more likely to be involved in some kind of incident or crash. Your hazard perception ability vastly decreases. Your eye movements will change – so you’ll look around the scene less, and that can have implications for what you see and you don’t see. And those hazards that you do notice, you’ll take significantly longer to react to. So our research that I’ve done collaboratively largely with Graham Hole from the University of Sussex has looked into some of the specifics of that.
We wanted to identify – we know this is a problem, but why is it a problem? And it seems that it’s cognitive distraction that’s the issue. It’s not really whether you have both hands on the steering wheel and both eyes on the road ahead, because what we’ve been able to identify is that you can be in that situation – hands appropriately on 10 to 2 on the wheel and eyes looking at the road ahead – but if your mind is elsewhere, on a phone conversation, then you can miss things that happen right in front of your eyes. One particular experiment that we carried out put drivers in a driving simulator, and we tracked their eye movements. And we had this theory that perhaps the mobile phone conversation is drawing on cognitive resources that are actually needed for the driving task, and that’s why there’s a problem in terms of noticing and reacting to hazards. So, we asked some of our participants to complete a secondary task – a phone task, hands-free – which induced imagery. We asked them things like “true or false: in a rowing boat, a rower sits with his back to the front of the boat?”, “do cows have hanging ears?”. All of these kind of things that in order to answer, you probably have to conjure up an image in your head. We had another group of participants who weren’t distracted, and yet another group of participants who were distracted by non-imagery inducing statements – things that you either know or you don’t know, and they needed to verify. So, “the capital of Spain is Madrid”. Things that you probably don’t need to picture. And what we found was that it seems when people have a mobile phone conversation, they tend to picture their conversation partner; where they are, what they’re discussing, what they’re talking about, and you spontaneously create these mental images. The same brain areas that are needed for visual perception are also needed to create these mental images, and that can explain why a driver can look directly at something – and we know they’ve looked directly at it because we’ve tracked their eye movements – yet they’ve failed to react to it. When you ask them later, they say they didn’t see it – so in that particular experiment, those participants who were distracted by imagery inducing statements noticed far fewer hazards than any other participants. Those who were distracted by non-imagery were also worse than those who drove undistracted. But those distracted by imagery showed the worst performance overall. So, they either didn’t spot hazards, or if they did, they took up to a second longer to react to them, even if that hazard occurred right in front of them where we could demonstrate that their eye was directly pointed and trying to take in that information. It demonstrates a phenomenon known as inattention blindness; looking without seeing, so from that research – and we’ve built on that, and many others have done relevant work in that area – we can say that drivers on the phone, whether handheld or hands-free, can suffer from inattention blindness. They can look directly at things, yet not see them – and because they don’t see them, they don’t react to them.
Simon: So is that because the brain can’t physically hold two images at once? It can’t process the visual information from what’s going on in front of the driver at the same time as creating this mental image – it’s kind of one or the other?
Gemma: Kind of. I think it’s probably fair to say that the brain can attempt to process both things at once. But I think the issue is that we tend to try and think of our brain as being similar to a computer, in the sense that we can have multiple streams of information being processed at the same time, and that we can divide that beam of attention – but actually, what we know, is that we tend to switch between tasks, rather than divide our attention. That shift can be very quick, so much so that we don’t necessarily notice it ourselves. But there will be points in time when our brain isn’t actively processing the driving scene ahead of us – the information that we’re taking in – because it’s busy processing something else; a mental image, whatever that might be. So, it’s competition for cognitive resources for these two tasks. Both tasks are drawing on this same pool of resources, if you like, and like in any competition, one task tends to win. So, if it’s the phone conversation task that wins, and takes those visual resources away from the driving task, then the driver’s eyes can be on the road, but they’re not processing that information all the time.
Simon: So that sounds like we’re talking about, effectively, multitasking there, doesn’t it?
Gemma: Exactly.
Simon: And many people believe they can multitask – “I can drive and I can use the phone at the same time” – is that not true?
Gemma: It’s not that it’s not true, it’s that I think our understanding of what multitasking is, is distinct and different to what we know about how the brain works. What we know about multitasking is that yes, sometimes we can maintain a couple of tasks at the same time, but what we’re doing is we’re shifting between those two tasks. We’re not keeping them going at a constant level simultaneously. We’re shifting. What we also know is that when we multitask, generally speaking, both tasks will be performed worse than if we tried to do them individually. So it’s far better, cognitively speaking, to focus on one task and then do another, rather than trying to do them simultaneously. Of course, that’s not practical all the time in everyday life. So we talk about multitasking, and we talk about the importance of multitasking, but our understanding of what that means is quite different from what our brain can actually achieve.
Simon: So, if drivers who haven’t had an accident while they’re on the phone – and there are obviously many of those – it’s kind of believing that they’re a bit invincible. They think “I haven’t had an accident so far…”. It sounds like they’re not recognising the fact that they’ve missed so much of what’s been going on while they’ve been on the phone. They don’t perceive there’s a risk, because they haven’t been aware of the risk while it was happening.
Gemma: Absolutely – that taps into a really key thing in this whole piece of research, which is that around 80% of drivers consider themselves to be better than average at driving – which, statistically is possible but is also highly unlikely! Someone needs to be average, someone needs to be below average. So, if you’re driving along and you haven’t had a crash, you haven’t been involved in any kind of incident, you tend to be – if you’re distracted – unaware of how unaware you are.
What will happen is other road users – whether that be other drivers, pedestrians, whatever – will be compensating for your lack of awareness. So, in the absence of any kind of catastrophic crash – which you obviously become aware of – a distracted driver, generally speaking, will be unaware of how many near-misses they’ve had, how many times they’ve driven too close to the vehicle in front, if they’ve veered out of their lane – so it’s kind of like a confirmation bias for these drivers; the majority think they’re better than average, they’ve never had a crash, they’ve never had an incident whilst using their hands-free phone, therefore they’re fine. And what’s interesting is that same group of drivers – the majority – will comment that they fully support laws banning mobile phone use, banning handheld phone use, and many will even go so far as to say “any type of mobile phone use is really a danger and I can understand that, and other people shouldn’t do it – but not me, because I’m better than average, and I’ve never been involved in any kind of incident”.
So it’s a real tension, because you present data such as ours, empirical data that looks at reaction times and eye movements and all of those kind of, if you like, geeky areas of research that can explain why it’s a problem cognitively. But we’re all human. So when we communicate that to people, it’s quite common, in fact it’s extremely common that there’s a defence of that. You know, this is really inconvenient research. People don’t want to be told that they can’t multitask, because that’s what we’re told we should constantly be doing. And they don’t want to be told that hands-free mobile phone use is any different to talking to a passenger in the vehicle, because this stuff is all pre-installed in their vehicles, and they’re expected to use it by family, friends, employers or whatever. So there’s a real tension between what we understand about how our brain works, and how we can communicate these messages in a convincing way, so that people can’t just say “no, sorry – it’s no different”.
Simon: You mentioned passengers there – one of the most frequent excuses or challenges to this is “well how is phone distraction different to talking to a passenger in the car?”. How is it different?
Gemma: Well it taps into what we said about imagery but also it’s an issue of shared environment. So, a passenger within your vehicle can obviously see what you can see, they can see the challenges that you are facing and can regulate their conversation accordingly. By that, I mean hopefully they will stop talking if they can see that you’re facing a particularly challenging driving situation. Or they might even help – pointing out a vehicle that you haven’t perhaps spotted – whereas someone on the phone doesn’t have the benefit of that shared environment, so they’re going to continue to demand your precious attention. In fact, if you stop talking – which is a common thing; your brain will say I need to process this information, I’m going to stop responding to another task – if you stop talking momentarily on a mobile phone conversation, your conversation partner is likely to say “are you still there?” and demand your attention back to them, so, this issue of shared environment is a big difference in terms of the distraction imposed by a passenger compared to a mobile phone conversation.
Simon: Yeah. I want to delve a little bit now into what employers can do about this. This is one of the major driving at work risks for employers – and I don’t think there are many employers that don’t see it as a risk – they just don’t know how to manage it effectively. And, I had Mark Cartwright on the show recently from Highways England talking about Operation Tramline, which is where the police roam the motorways in unmarked lorry cabs taking film of poor driving behaviour. And one of the most common offences that they see – whether it’s truck drivers, van drivers or car drivers, because it catches offences in all of those different vehicle types – is phone distraction. And a lot of handheld phone use – so employers clearly need to set down rules, and that means putting guidance on mobile phone use in their ‘Driving for Work’ policy. What do you think that guidance needs to include?
Gemma: It’s a really tricky one, because obviously, if you’re driving for work, for a living, then your employer has a responsibility to keep you safe – but of course, it’s kind of a shared responsibility as well. The first thing I always say to people making policy for workplace driving safety is that you need to be aware of that shared responsibility. Your employer needs to be very clear on their position on phone use – and of course, handheld phone use is illegal, so that position should be clear, but it can still be even more clearly communicated – if you are found to be texting at traffic lights, or checking your next drop, or doing any kind of handheld activity on a phone, you will lose your job.
From the flip side, of course, from the employee’s side, it’s your driver’s licence. It’s your job, so there’s that shared responsibility. But in terms of what the policy needs to set out; whether there’s a ban on any type of phone use – which many companies are now taking on board – or if it’s just a ban on illegal phone use – you would hope that the existence of the law would cover that, but as I’ve said, it doesn’t. As you’ve said, it demonstrably doesn’t.
I think there’s a lot to be done in terms of policy relating to education, so explaining why it’s an issue, not just that it is, or that you’ll get sacked if you’re caught using it. There needs to be a level of accountability, but that needs to be explained and made clear to drivers -evidence-based education such as ours can help with that, but in other clear policy terms, we need an agreement between managers and drivers about what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable. If you have an all-out ban on any type of phone use by your drivers, then you as a manager should not have an expectation that your driver will answer a phone call at any time that you call them. You have to have a clear policy that says ‘at this time in your working day, you need to be parked up and available’. There are big challenges there when we talk about delivery drivers, for example. They have multiple drops, and they need to get updated routes and information like that, so, I’m not naive to the fact that it’s actually a massive challenge if we try to ban any type of phone use in this area – but individual companies must have a really specific, clear policy on what is and isn’t acceptable, that is followed by all members of that organisation. It will sound really obvious, but we know from the Driving for Better Business survey that came out a couple of years ago is that there is a real disconnect between what management expect and what employees expect, and how that ties in with company policy.
Simon: Yeah. I’ve spoken to a number of fleet operators now who have introduced zero tolerance phone policies, and the most common argument for not doing it is that “our staff need to be contactable, we need to be able to update them”. But most of the companies I know that have instigated a zero tolerance phone policy have been able to make it work. They have times when the drivers can stop and get updates. The drivers understand when a safe time to answer the phone and when to update is. And it doesn’t impact their productivity if managed correctly. But I think the key thing in this that you’ve mentioned there, and the survey that we did, showed that 49% of senior executives expected their drivers to answer the phone while driving – and many of those had policies which told the drivers that they weren’t allowed to answer the phone.
So it’s so important that everybody in the company leads by example – if you’ve got the executives disrespecting the policy and phoning up the drivers, then the drivers have no respect for the policy either, do they?
Gemma: Absolutely. A company policy has to apply to every employee, and if there’s even a whiff of the fact that senior executives are allowed loopholes, then you won’t get compliance from other employees because it’s a demonstration that the policy isn’t effective and won’t be enforced. So that comes back to another thing that we know from psychological research – you need a clear policy of course, but if that policy is broken by any employee, you need an appropriate approach to dealing with that. Because otherwise the policy doesn’t work as a deterrent to doing what you shouldn’t be doing. As long as there’s a clear policy, and it’s backed up by deterrents in the sense that “if you’re caught doing this, there will be a consequence, regardless of who you are – the CEO or one of the delivery drivers – there will be consequences”. But in order for that to happen, there needs to be a credible threat of being caught. If drivers know that there’s no way of it being detected that they’re sending a quick text, or they’re answering a phone call from their manager and their manager said “it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone”, then it’s not going to work either. It’s a real challenge. You need that kind of threat – which sounds strong – but you need a threat in order for deterrents to work, and that needs to be backed up by education. So as you’re saying, those companies where they have got an all-out ban, and it is working, and drivers understand why it’s in place and understand when they can stop and take calls, I would assume that that’s because they’ve got a clear policy, and they’ve explained why. People want to know why.
Simon: The resources for drivers – educating drivers is a really good point. We’ve just produced something called the Van Driver Toolkit, which is a series of safety updates for drivers which are free to access for employers – and one of those safety updates is around mobile phone distraction. And it shows the consequences of doing it, there are some helpful tips on how to not do it, it explains – in very simple terms, in a very short piece of collateral – what the drivers need to know so they can make their own decisions, informed decisions, around that. Employers are free to download those and share them with their drivers, so I’ll share the link to that in the show notes at the end.
So, we talked about the survey Driving for Better Business had done earlier, and something else that came out of that survey was that – and I was quite staggered by this statistic – 1 in 6, so 17% of those who drove for work – having surveyed over 1000 drivers; it was a professionally conducted survey – 1 in 6 of them said they’d been involved in an incident while on the phone to their boss or a colleague – so we’ve got the proof that this is quite clearly a problem for businesses. Now, many of those wouldn’t have been injury collisions. But it just shows how reducing phone use can reduce the chance of even damage only incidents, which then disrupt the business and result in expensive damage repairs. I mean, that’s another reason for businesses to look seriously at curtailing phone use while driving, isn’t it?
Gemma: Absolutely. In terms of costs, of course. As you say, not all incidents will involve contact collisions, or they might and you’ve got damage of course. But there’s also the level of social responsibility for companies. Of course the company wants to save money. Of course the company wants to keep their employees safe. But equally, they’ve got a social responsibility to keep other road users safe from their potentially distracted drivers, so there’s a reputational issue as well, of course. You know, all of us who use the roads have this social responsibility to interact appropriately on the road network. Now, again, that might sound very naïve, but that’s how the system ultimately has to work, and when it breaks down it can have quite catastrophic impacts of course. So yes, it’s certainly in the interests of individual companies, as well as wider society, to tackle this problem, because we do know it’s a growing problem; not just amongst people who drive for work, but amongst the general public. Self-reported phone use – handheld and hands-free – is on the up. It’s increasing, and so are the number of police-recorded incidents that are attributed to distraction – so it’s a real problem.
Simon: Yeah, it is. And we’ve seen that from our research as well, and as I say, the Operation Tramline footage that we’ve seen. Gemma, have you got any resources that we can share with listeners that might help them manage phone distraction among their drivers?
Gemma: Yes, certainly – because I’m based at the Open University, we’ve got an online learning platform that’s entirely free, called OpenLearn and myself and my colleague Dr Jim Turner have created a couple of interactive activities that are freely available that sit on OpenLearn. These are evidence-based activities. They’re gamified, if you like. The idea is, it takes about 10 minutes to complete. You go along and you experience distraction for yourself. In the first one that we’ve got, called ‘Are You a Focused Driver?’, you watch a very quick series of clips – some of which may contain a hazard – and you’re asked to look out for those hazards. And at the same time, you receive a phone call from a very demanding friend who’s giving you a shopping list of things that you need to remember. The idea is that you’re engaging in a cognitively demanding task, as well as driving – as well as looking for hazards. You’re then asked a couple of questions about that phone task, about what you remember, because we want to know how you perform on both tasks. And then you’re asked about which hazards you notice and which you don’t, and people are given immediate feedback, so they get a score for their phone conversation answers and they get a score for their hazard perception. It’s been done by thousands of people. What we’ve found is that people tend to do well in one task or the other, not both. Which is entirely backing up the research that we’ve done, and many others have done too, so it’s a nice little fun and non-judgmental approach to education, and once you’ve completed the task, there are further links where you can find out more information. There’s a video of me talking about research in this area, and again, explaining why it’s a problem and why you might have just completed this and not done too well.
The second one we launched at the end of last year. It was called ‘The Mobile Office Challenge’ and this one might be particularly relevant to people who drive for work of course. The idea is that, obviously a lot of people drive for work, so their car does in effect become a mobile office. And in this one we were quite interested in looking at driver confidence that you’ve noticed all of the hazards, and that you’ve performed well in that phone conversation. Without giving too much away – you are put in the position, you’re told that you’re a wedding planner driving between appointments and you receive a phone call from a couple whose wedding you’re planning, so that you can plan their wedding appropriately. At the same time, you need to look out for hazards, and then you’re asked some questions along the way; how confident are you that you’ve noticed all of these hazards? How confident are you that you can meet your client’s needs. Again, unsurprisingly, we found that people tend to do well in one or the other task. In this one, there’s a nice distinction because you get to first complete this hazard perception task with a phone conversation, and then you do it without a phone conversation, so you can compare your own performance between being distracted and not being distracted. In terms of hazard perception and how well you do, unsurprisingly, those doing just the hazard perception task tend to perform much better. And then again there’s more information and more links and FAQs at the end. The idea is that these are freely available, they’ve been adopted by various police forces who have used them as roadside education tools, for example. The idea is that it’s explaining why it’s a problem – not just that it is – and allowing people to witness their own distraction, which means they can’t then say “yeah, but this doesn’t mean me”.because they have seen their results themselves.
Simon: Those sound fantastic. I’ve seen some of those myself and we’ve got them on the Driving for Better Business website, so I’ll make sure all of the links to those resources are in the show notes, so listeners can access those and download them. Gemma, phone distraction is obviously one of the key things that employers and fleet operators have got to manage – I really appreciate you sharing your insights with us. That has been fantastic, thank you so much for being on the show.
Gemma: You’re welcome, thanks for having me.
Simon: And thank you everyone for listening!
Monday Aug 09, 2021
Monday Aug 09, 2021
Show notes
Simon Turner is joined in this podcast by Mark Cartwright from Highways England.
Mark was previously at the Freight Transport Association where he was head of vans and light commercial vehicles, and was the brains behind the van excellence programme.
He now brings over 30 years of experience to Highways England as head of their Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention Team.
In this podcast I talk to Mark about the lack of awareness among some van drivers and operators of their obligations – specifically around issues like overloading and vehicle maintenance.
We discuss why some van operators seem to think the rules don’t apply to them and various ways they and their drivers can get caught out.
We talk about the new resources that Mark’s team have developed in collaboration with DfBB to tackle driver wellbeing and driver communication challenges.
And finally we talk about the new Euro NCAP van safety ratings and why van operators should be demanding safer vehicles for their drivers.
Useful Links:
Highways England resources for commercial vehicle operators and drivers
https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?category=CVIP
DfBB Resources: Loading and load security
CALM Driver
https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/calmdriver/
DfBB Van Driver Toolkit
https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/van-driver-toolkit/
Euro NCAP Van Safety Ratings
https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/articles/how-safe-are-your-vans/
https://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/safety-campaigns/2021-commercial-van-safety/
Transcript
Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.
I’m Simon Turner and I’m the Campaign Manager for Driving for Better Business, and I’m joined today by Mark Cartwright from Highways England. Mark was previously at the Freight Transport Association, where he was Head of Vans and Light Commercial Vehicles, and where he was the brains behind the Van Excellence programme. He now brings over 30 years of experience to Highways England as Head of their Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention Team. In this podcast, I talk to Mark about the lack of awareness among some van drivers and operators about their obligations, and specifically around issues like overloading and vehicle maintenance. We discuss why some van operators seem to think the rules don’t apply to them, and the various ways that both they and their drivers can get caught out. Then we talk about the new resources that Mark’s team have developed in collaboration with Driving for Better Business to tackle driver wellbeing and driver communication challenges. And finally, we talk about the new Euro NCAP van safety ratings, and why van operators should be demanding safer vehicles for their drivers.
Simon: Hi Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark: Hi Simon.
Simon: Mark, you’ve obviously got years of experience with commercial vehicles – perhaps we could start by just talking a little bit about your role with Highways England – what does that entail and where’s your main focus at the moment?
Mark: Thanks Simon. It’s an interesting role, I guess, the job title, Head of Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention really tells you all you need to know – it’s very much a ‘does what it says on the can’ kind of role. I guess in terms of our activities and our focus, the team has always had quite a focus on heavy commercial vehicles, on trucks and in particular their condition on the road, their roadworthiness, the state of their loading, etcetera. And we’re keeping going in that, because clearly that’s an important area for us, but we’re moving more and more of a focus onto light commercial vehicles, and as part and parcel of that, looking at how we influence the behaviours of drivers and their managers to be doing the right thing on the road.
Simon: There’s obviously a huge amount of more vans on the road than there are trucks so that seems like a sensible direction to take, to focus more on the light commercials, as well. What are the main problems you see with those?
Mark: Yeah right, I mean just in terms of numbers around four and a half million vans on the road at the moment compared to probably somewhere in the region of 420,000 trucks so you know, you don’t need to think too long and hard to realise there’s an area of activity there for us.
The work that we’ve been doing, I guess the first thing to say is Highways England has no enforcement powers, so we’re working with our colleagues in enforcement on trying to influence the behaviours of the drivers and managers I mentioned, but to be honest, most of the issues that we find are pretty straightforward stuff.
So there’s a degree of frustration that we find these issues, but I guess there’s an understanding that with the right attitudes they’re actually fairly easy things to fix. So we see overloading – there’s an ongoing lack of awareness, it seems, that the capacity of light commercial vehicles isn’t down to just how much you can actually get on the back, and there are weight limits involved. We see issues around the security of those loads, which of course, given what we do, is a big concern for us. But we also see the kind of road worthiness issues which frankly ought to be being picked up by any kind of cursory pre-use check of the vehicle, before we even get to it. That tells me that, by and large, there’s quite a lack of awareness within drivers and the operators as to the very basics of operating commercial vehicles. A statistic which is quite interesting, I’m sure many of our listeners will be aware of this, is the first-time MOT failure rate on vans is around just shy of 50%. So that’s a vehicle which has been sent in to be checked over – now most of the things that these vans are failing their MOTs on are the kind of thing I’ve mentioned. They’re turning up for an MOT with dodgy tyres or with bulbs that aren’t working, lights that aren’t working, windscreen wipers, all that kind of stuff. And there are all the kinds of things that ought to be picked up by even the most straightforward of pre-use checks on vehicles. So, again, I guess that kind of supports our view that if the vans aren’t being checked the day before they’re going in for their MOT, I’m pretty sure they haven’t been checked on any of the other 364 days that are available to them. So, very frustrating, but the reality of it is, if we can change attitudes, it’s pretty easy to fix.
Simon: With vehicle checks then, do you think it’s part of the problem people just not doing checks, or are they just not doing them often enough?
Mark: I think there are two areas of it, to be honest, I mean one, there’s this lack of awareness that I speak about. And to be honest, I think most of the time it is genuinely a lack of awareness – you know, we see vans being operated by businesses who are very health and safety conscious, very good at managing their health and safety in the primary areas of their business. Whether they be, you know, in the building trades, civil engineers, landscapers, scaffolders, you know, whatever. They’re very good at managing the health and safety, away from the vehicle, but it doesn’t necessarily seem to translate to the vehicle operation which again is, is frustrating but it’s something that, you know, we can address. So I think there’s a lack of awareness in there. The other issue in the van space, with pre-use checks I think, is just the logistics of doing it. In the truck world, a piece of paper served perfectly well for many operators for many, many years – you know, the driver takes some form, fills out the form, hands it in at the gate or the traffic office or whatever. And it’s dealt with as it needs to be dealt with. The problem with vans, or the issue with vans, is a good 80% of them – in our estimation – live outside of somebody’s house so it’s all very well carrying out the check on a piece of paper for example, but what happens to that piece of paper after. So you know we’ve become a big fan of pre-use defect checks apps over the last couple of years because they literally get around that issue of delivering the report from where the vehicle is to the individual that can make the decision as to what happens next
Simon: With the main reasons for MOT failures I think one of the biggest is typically wheel or tyre related, and brake related, which are, you know… tyres are obviously something that should be picked up on a pre-use defect check but when you link that with what you said previously about loading issues that makes it doubly critical doesn’t it?
Mark: Oh absolutely and, you know, I know it’s probably a statement of the blindingly obvious but if you’ve got a truck running at 44 tonnes – it’s got an awful lot more, I don’t want to call it leeway, but it’s got greater margins in terms of its operational capacity than the three and a half tonne van. You know, an overload of a tonne on a van or 500 kilos on a van is a big percentage of overload and you’re going to put that equipment under a lot of strain. It’s not, percentage wise, that big an overload on a truck – not that I’m condoning it at all but the margins of that are clearly significantly less on the light commercial vehicle.
Simon: Is it quite common for overloaded vans to get picked up? I’ve got a DVSA weigh station I think near where I live, and I see plenty of pictures on social media of police, and road policing units that have pulled in overloaded vans that would be comically overloaded if it weren’t so serious, but, you know, is it common that presumably the police know what they’re looking for and the DVSA know what they’re looking for?
Mark: Absolutely. I mean, bear in mind the DVSA by and large, are more concerned with the operator licence classes of vehicles – the trucks, buses and coaches, but they are turning more and more of their resource to the van space. Police, absolutely, both organisations have constraints in the level of resource they put to it. But as we’ve identified with both of those agencies spotting an overloaded van actually isn’t the hardest thing in the world to do, and their strike rate – if I can call it that – when they’re pulling vehicles in is high. But it’s the old issue, there’s so many vans out there. I think weight issues are fairly endemic in the light commercial vehicle sector and you know it’s down to operators and importantly the people who are procuring the work from operators to, to ensure that everybody knows what’s expected of them.
Simon: If a fleet operator has a fleet of vans, and overloading isn’t something that’s occurred to them before, what should they be looking to do – A, to see if it’s an issue, and B, if it is an issue, how do they go about dealing with it?
Mark: You need to be sensible. You need to understand what the weight of the vehicle is to start with and, you know, from an operator’s point of view, please take into account a full fuel tank, and the drivers and the crew that are engaged in the vehicle – you know, some of us can be a fair amount of weight to begin with before you even start with what’s on the back of the vehicle. And, if you’re not sure, take it to the local weighbridge, get it checked out and make sure that you understand what the weight of that vehicle is. Something that we see quite commonly is in what we call the ‘doing van sector’ – so vans that are being used by, you know, engineers and builders and gas fitters and all the rest of it to do their jobs – a mobile shed, kind of van where the vehicle will come out of conversion weighing a smidge under 3500 kilos. And by their nature, drivers and these engineers tend to collect stuff and, you know, we see all kinds of stuff in there which maybe the operator isn’t even aware of. One of the things that I think is absolutely really good best practice, aside from, you know, checking it out at the weighbridge, is for an operator just to take every opportunity that they can to stick their head in the back of their guys’ vans and see what’s in there. We’ve already mentioned an awful lot of vans are based at drivers’ premises at the drivers’ homes. It’s good to take the opportunity to have a look in the back of the van and make sure what you’re comfortable with what you’re seeing in there – not just from a weight issue but also from the security overload issue, again that’s a parallel problem that we see an awful lot.
Simon: We know that truck operators are covered by lots of regulations – so they have operator licences and they’re checked and regulated by the traffic commissioners and if they get caught doing stuff wrong, they get pulled in – that will have to go to an inquiry with the traffic commissioners. So there’s a common misconception I guess that vans aren’t subject to the same rules or indeed any rules at all. What rules do apply to van operators?
Mark: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there, Simon, in terms of the common misconceptions. Because we come across an awful lot of van operators who frankly don’t understand that there are regulations. I think the best way I’ve ever seen that message got across is via a fairly senior police officer that we’ve done a load of work with in the past, who has got an audience together – and we’ve supported him in a few events – where he’s had van operators and truck operators, and operators of both vans and trucks in a room and his party piece is to the start the meeting by saying, okay, “put your hands up in the air if you run vans”. And all these hands go up in the air. “Stick your hand up in the air if you run trucks”, and, you know automatically people tend to take the van hand down. He says “no, no, please leave your van hand up, put your other hand up in the air if you’re running trucks”. So, you end up with a bunch of people in the room with both hands stuck up in the air. He’ll then ask the question of “those of you who are running vans and trucks – how many of you are doing it to different standards, different policies, and different procedures”. And every time I’ve seen him do this, the room will split into three groups. There’s those who do run their vans and their trucks to the same kind of standards and processes. There’ll be those who don’t run them to the same standards, and will admit it. And there’s always a very fascinating group of those who do run them to different standards but there’s no way they’re going to admit it. So those are the ones who are normally a little bit sweaty, and avoid giving eye contact. What he’ll then do is say “okay, those of you who are running them in different ways, why?”. And every time I’ve seen this happen, sooner or later, somebody will break cover and say “well, it’s because the law’s different” which I always think is quite a brave thing to say to a senior police officer that the law is different – which is exactly what he’s looking for, because the reality of it is, the law isn’t any different. There is law and regulations covering drivers’ hours in both vans and trucks, loading within vans and trucks, roadworthiness. Any issue that you want to look at, the law is pretty much the same – if not identical – in the van and truck space. But maybe it’s because people are confusing the law with operator licencing. Maybe it’s because they’re not seeing necessarily the level of enforcement at the side of a road. But, the bottom line is that the legislation is pretty much the same.
The other thing that, you know, again, we’re very keen to stress to operators of vans is – particularly if they’re running trucks as well – the traffic commissioners won’t look particularly kindly on a truck and a van operator that can’t operate their vans to the right standard. I’ve heard an ex-senior traffic commissioner say directly to an operator – a van operator – who was having some issues “look, if you can’t run your vans properly, I really don’t see why I should trust you with a fleet of trucks”. And you know, I think people do need to bear that in mind.
Simon: Yeah, and the fact that you’ve got an operator licence to run heavy goods vehicles – if you are found to be doing something wrong with vans, or even cars, it can go against your good reputation for running the heavies as well, can’t it?
Mark: Oh absolutely, and, you know, it is a risk to actually operating businesses; the way that their vans are being run around the place. And something that you just mentioned there we see quite regularly is that it’s a different department, it’s a different person – it’s not necessarily somebody with the right qualifications and the right kind of experiences running the van fleet. It tends to be, you know, a job that finds its way to wherever it finds its way to within an organisation. I think one of the things that we see in the van space quite regularly as well is what we used to call, smilingly, the ‘organically grown van fleet’. So it’s the local business, the local entrepreneur that set themselves up as a gardener, or dog walker, or window washer, or window cleaner – whatever it happens to be – and got good at it. And 5, 10 years down the line they look out the window and there’s 10, 20, 50 vans parked outside with a name written on the side of it in five-foot-high letters. But they haven’t gone through the same learning processes as a truck operator would do, and, you know, probably don’t realise that, one, they’re running a fairly sizable fleet with all the costs and everything that goes with that. But also, there’s a significant reputational risk in the health and safety risks of our business. I see that quite regularly, I’m afraid.
Simon: Yeah, and, and one of the things they’ve got to contend with now is that there’s a lot more interest from the enforcement authorities – the police and the DVSA – in doing these compliance stops where they’re checking. So a lot of those kinds of businesses where they haven’t had that learning and they don’t fully understand what’s required, and what their responsibilities entail… they can quickly find that their drivers are getting stopped on a regular basis and possibly even the business disrupted because, maybe, the vehicles aren’t allowed to continue for whatever reason. And I know, you’re involved in some of those – what’s your team doing to improve compliance? And how do you work with the enforcement agencies to raise standards? What do fleet operators need to know about those kinds of things?
Mark: We work with enforcement agencies in a number of ways really. One is in terms of trying to provide them with some of the expertise that they may need to be working in the commercial vehicle sector. They are very keen to not just prosecute and enforce people, but also to engage with operators – particularly in the van space, where an operator and the driver… it’s fairly clear that they may not actually know what’s expected of them. They’re not steaming in with prosecutions and fixed penalty notices – the aim is really all about improving the safety measures.
I guess the biggest high-profile thing that we do with enforcement agencies is Operation Tramline, which many of your listeners may have heard of. This is where we support the police by lending them one of our HGV cabs. It’s quite strange; the Daily Mail readers tend to recognise these as our ‘undercover super cabs’ – they’re not. They’re just white daf tractor units, they’re certainly not super cabs! They’ve got some minor adaptations in so much as the speed limiting is desirable, and they’ve got 360-degree cameras on them. But I wouldn’t exactly call them super cabs. But you know, they’re very useful. They provide an elevated camera platform for the police. They just help them identify what’s going on around them on the network. One of the misconceptions about Tramline that’s probably worth just clearing up a little bit is that they target other trucks – they don’t. They target anybody that’s demonstrating unsafe behaviours. Statistically about 40% or so of the stops do involve other HGVs, and there’s no getting around the fact that the elevated platform does give the police an opportunity to view across into the HGV cabs. And we see some poor behaviours – things that you really wouldn’t expect a professional driver to be doing. But another 30% are in the vans, and we can see it clearly provides a good vantage point into vans and we can see what’s going in there. But also the cars – so the split is 40% trucks, about 30% cars and 30% vans. And again, the kind of offences that are identified, again, sadly, were rather mundane. Still dangerous, but the kind of things I guess you’d expect us to be identifying, which is distraction – primarily use of mobile phones, not being in full control of the vehicle, people eating their lunch, etcetera, etcetera, putting makeup on. But we also find an awful lot of non-seatbelt wearing – which, again, baffles me to be honest. Why people wouldn’t wear a seatbelt? So it’s a very powerful piece, but it gives us the opportunity to engage with the drivers and, frankly, most of the time – a good 60% of the time – it’s words of advice and off you go, driver, learn your lesson from it. And all fleet operators need to know about this is we’re there to help and support to be brutally honest. We have had a number of situations now where we’ve provided direct feedback to operators about what we’ve discovered with their drivers on network – whether it be through Operation Tramline or other activity that we’re involved in. By and large, I have to say, they take it very well and actually get involved in sorting the issue out across the fleet.
Simon: Yeah, I’ve seen quite a bit of the footage that has come out of Op Tramline. My favourite, I think, was a truck driver who was eating a full three course meal, like a Sunday roast dinner on his knee with a plate and a knife and fork and all sorts of stuff. But the sort of footage that you get of the van drivers, and indeed car drivers, company car drivers… there is a huge amount where they’re playing or fiddling around with the phone, checking messages and they think because they’re kind of doing it in on their lap, almost, that the car next to them can’t see and they don’t think about the truck next to them that’s filming them doing it.
Mark: It’s so easy to focus on some of the comedy moments, I get that. And yeah, the three-course meal was quite impressive from a food hygiene and table manners point of view, not so good from a road safety point of view. But the reality of it is that the great majority of stuff is, you know, nowhere near as exciting as that, but still immensely dangerous. And, you know, the mobile phone thing amazes me that people think by putting a mobile phone on their knee, nobody’s going to notice – their head’s nodding up and down while they’re trying to answer text messages. It’s just such a dangerous thing to be doing.
Simon: Yeah. I wanted to cover a couple of projects that you and I have been working on specifically to target a couple of challenges that a lot of van fleet managers have. And one of them was around driver wellbeing, for instance. So we worked on a project last year which we launched in November with CALM – the mental health charity, or anti-suicide charity, Campaign Against Living Miserably. That was geared at trying to provide some level of support for van drivers who quite often find themselves effectively being a lone worker don’t they? Why is mental health such a big challenge within the van driving community?
Mark: That the whole project started with the realisation that that horrible statistic that I think most of us are aware of now, which is that suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 – it was such a close match with the demographic of van drivers and to a slightly lesser extent, truck drivers – feedback from operators tells us, you know, a good 99% of their drivers, are male, and in the van space a good 75% of those are male. So there’s such a tight fit with that demographic. But when we started exploring this with the guys at CALM, who – I have to say – have been brilliant with this, is that there are all kinds of other issues flowing in there as well. You know, by and large they’re lone workers, they were working in pressured industries with time constraints, they’re dealing with the pressures of the road and all the rest of it… they may be in the kinds of socio-economic classes that might be a little bit more prone to these kind of issues. And indeed, we stumbled across, during that process, a report from the ONS, the Office for National Statistics, which confirmed to us that commercial vehicle drivers, van drivers in particular, are some 20% more likely to take their life than their equivalent non-commercial vehicle drivers. And all we’re trying to do with the CALM driver initiative is just start the conversation. Our CALM driver initiative is just about trying to provide some resources for operators to provide a couple of stickers, a little leaflet, a web page which the guys can go and look at, signposting the crisis lines that CALM – and indeed other mental health charities – have available to us. It’s just trying to start the conversation in a demographic where, you know, there clearly are concerns to be addressed.
Simon: And those CALM driver packs are free to access – we’ve produced tens of thousands of them now, haven’t we, which we’re sharing out, so they’re free to access. You can register for those on the Driving for Better Business website, and I’ll put details of those in the show notes as well so people can go and download those. The other resource that we’ve been working on that’s almost due for launch now – we’re just finalising it – is the Van Driver Toolkit. So, what was the thinking behind that, Mark?
Mark: Okay, just to put people’s minds at rest, it’s not a bag of spanners that we’re trying to provide out to van drivers. But it’s really trying to address something we talked about a little bit earlier in the podcast which is that in the truck world, the operators know what’s expected of them, the drivers know what’s expected of them. In the van world, maybe not quite so much to be truthful… it’s trying to take away that “sorry, I didn’t know” excuse for poor behaviours. I guess that’s probably one of the major drivers behind the initiative. So, the Van Driver Toolkit consists of 35 topics and online modules. I think the best way of thinking of them is a double-sided piece of A5, although clearly these things will be available digitally for drivers and operators to access as well. But for each of those 35 topics, we’ve tried to come up with something that’s pretty punchy, pretty direct, pretty easy for drivers and operators to interpret. And fundamentally for each of the issues, is ‘this is why it’s important’. ‘This is what happens if you get it wrong, this is what happens if you get it right and this is what we’re expecting you to do’. And the topics are exactly what you’d expect them to be. You know, it’s talking about driver fatigue, it’s talking about driver distraction, it’s talking about changing weather conditions, vehicle overloading, speed limits on vehicles, etcetera, etcetera. And the trick with them, as far as I can see, is to make them easily digestible, which I hope that they are. And also to make sure that they’re easily and freely available – and again, you know, we’re going to put these out into the various van operating industries. They’re all there for people to see, they’re all there for people to use – whether it’s via linking to our website, whether it’s embedding them in their various intranets and their various driver apps and all the rest of it. It’s just there to provide support to the industry and try to become a… if you like a trusted voice within the van operating industries. You know, we haven’t got an axe to grind from the enforcement point of view, we just want to make life safer on our network.
Simon: Yeah, and I think both the CALM Driver and the Van Driver Toolkit are really excellent resources. I’m proud to be part of those and I think that most fleet operators will find those incredibly useful, so we’ll put links to both of those in the show notes.
Mark: I think something is probably worth saying… this is probably worth mentioning that both of those initiatives have been designed with input from the industry, you know, we haven’t locked ourselves away in the Highways England padded cell to come up with these ideas. We’ve been talking to operators right the way through the development, and taking a lot of views and thoughts. And if you take the Van Driver Toolkit in particular, you know, the sort of businesses that we’ve had trialling and providing support… they really like these. They’re gagging for us to release them. So, you know, for the listeners, please take that as an endorsement and a recommendation to why it is probably worth having a look at these.
Simon: Yeah, absolutely. They’re really well written. And the last thing I want to talk to you about, Mark, is a project that you were working on last year with Thatcham Research and Euro NCAP, which is the Van Safety Rating. So, I guess over the last five years, really, it’s become pretty common now for most passenger cars and company cars to have quite a high level of driver assistance technology, and specifically emergency braking systems. If you want a five-star Euro NCAP car now, it has to be fitted with that kind of technology. But vans have traditionally lagged quite a way behind that, and certainly until recently, hardly any vans at all had this technology on. But this new Euro NCAP Van Safety Rating is meant to help fleet operators identify some of the safer vans that have got collision avoidance technology on them. Can you tell us a little about that project and what you’re hoping to achieve with that?
Mark: Yeah, it’s been a really interesting project to be honest, and it’s ongoing but it’s really trying to learn from the experiences within the car sectors with that increased safety equipment I mean you’ve alluded to it now, Simon – it’s actually pretty difficult now to buy a car that hasn’t got, you know, a whole world of safety systems built into it, regardless of the size and the cost and the standard of a car, now. So, the kind of inbuilt safety equipment from airbags through to emergency braking through to lane departures is just almost taken for granted in the car space. But it’s really apparent when you compare that across to the van fleets – an awful lot of that equipment is either not available, or if it is available, it’s actually really difficult to source in a particular model with a particular kind of configuration and all the rest of it. And I guess the catalyst for the arms race, almost, that has developed in the car space was the introduction of the NCAP ratings on cars all those years ago, and Renault Laguna suddenly, you know, taking the lead in being the safest car in the world. And that’s exactly what we want to replicate in the van space, and it really is an eye opener when you start digging into it and you realise that it’s virtually impossible to buy a van with anywhere near comparable safety equipment built into it as it is on even a fairly standard family saloon car. And that’s an environment that the driver, and anybody else involved in that particular job, is going to be spending way longer in probably than they would in their own passenger car. And even when the kit is fitted, very often it’s two or three models behind what is currently being fitted to that same manufacturers’ car fleet. And, you know, the whole project is really designed to try and light a blue touch paper under this important topic and actually make vans technically engineered, as safely as the comparable cars. So, it’s got a way to go yet, but it’s showing good progress. And it’s really interesting and genuinely a very important, important development.
Simon: Yeah, and I know Thatcham did some research with Euro NCAP a few years back now, when cars were passing this threshold and proved quite conclusively that cars with this kind of technology were involved in significantly less rear end collisions and they were significantly less likely to be hit with third party insurance claims. And the business benefits of having cars with this technology… they were really significant weren’t they. And so I think what we’re looking for here really is for fleets to realise that same equation works with vans and to start demanding that technology from the van manufacturers – so that the manufacturers will start putting in the latest technology. Because they’ve already got that technology – it’s on the cars – they just need to fit it to the vans as well. And then really, we’re really only going to get traction with this if fleet operators start demanding that from the manufacturers.
Mark: Yeah, and that’s the other side of the equation, Simon – making it clear to specifiers whether they buying directly or via a leaser and all the rest of it that this equipment ought to be on the vehicles and putting some pressure on the manufacturers to step up to the plate with it. Because, as you say, it’s not as if they’ve got to go and invent it. The kit is already there, they just need to fit it and implement it in the van space. And there’s a lot of stuff that van manufacturers could be doing in this space. It’s a particular bug bear of mine that vans, for example, aren’t automatically speed limited to 70 miles an hour. At the end of the day, a van is a commercial tool. What other tool could you buy that would allow you to break the law in a commercial setting? You know, you couldn’t go out and buy a brake press and ask for the guards to be removed so you could go a bit faster. I genuinely don’t understand why the vehicles aren’t made and marketed and sold as being the commercial tool they happen to be. So yeah, there’s a lot to be done there. It will hopefully reduce the level of incidents, as you’ve said Simon, but the other important thing is it will reduce incident severity and make it more survivable.
Simon: Mark, thank you very much. It’s been a really illuminating conversation. I really appreciate you sharing your insights with us today – it’s been fascinating. Thank you very much.
Mark: Absolute pleasure Simon.