New transport survey: Trucks not the default cause of accidents

Logistics and fleet vehicle management organisation, Webfleet, has released its maiden road safety report for 2022 that is said to provide an “unavailable insight into the cause of incidents on South Africa’s roads”.

The findings

Basing its research on incidents and accidents involving vehicles ranging from vans to large trucks over the past year, the results, calculated over 14 000 responses to a survey, discovered the following:

• Minor to major accidents: 8.9%
• Accidents due to distracted driving: 21%
• Accidents caused by other vehicles: 33%
• Speeding: 7%
• Driver fatigue accidents: 12%
• Reckless driving: 7%
• Drunk driving: 4%
• Poor road conditions: 7%
• Pedestrian accidents: 1%

“With the persistent culture of non-compliance amongst motorists and officials alike in South Africa, it is not very surprising that transport companies placed other road users as the leading risk factor in the collisions they experience,” Sales Director at Webfleet, Justin Manson said.

“With recent news coverage seeming to place the blame on truck drivers, the reality is that other motorists, who may not be held to certain sector specific driving, training and safety standards, contribute to the rising number of road incidents.”

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“Unfortunately, this and other external factors, like road conditions and weather, are out of transport operators’ control. They do, however, have the ability to substantially bring down risk in the areas they do have control over.”

Manson, however, stated that while some encouragement needs to be taken from four companies registering  no accidents to any of its combined fleet of 160 trucks all year in the so-called dangerous goods sector, the number of accidents are still increasing regardless of the measures taken to prevent it.

“The difficulty in achieving improvements in this arena lies in the lack of accurate data to enable road safety practitioners to measure the actual situation to manage it more effectively,” Manson said.

Report