Workplace Transport Safety: Keeping Vehicles and People Apart

The Risk Hiding in Plain Sight

Every year, people are killed and seriously injured by vehicles in workplaces: struck by forklifts in warehouses, crushed by reversing lorries in yards, hit by vans in car parks. Unlike many workplace hazards, transport risk is easy to see, vehicles and people sharing the same space, yet it persists because everyone involved has done it a thousand times without incident. Familiarity is not a control measure.

The legal duties come from the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, which require workplaces to be organised so pedestrians and vehicles can circulate safely.

Think in Three Parts: Site, Vehicle, Driver

Safe site

Layout does more than any rulebook. The goal is to keep vehicles and pedestrians apart, and where they must meet, to make the meeting predictable:

• Separate pedestrian routes with physical barriers where possible, not just painted lines, and clearly marked crossing points where routes intersect
• One-way systems to reduce reversing, which features in a large share of serious incidents
• Designated parking, loading and unloading areas, with drivers given a safe place to wait away from the vehicle during loading
• Good lighting, especially in yards during winter months, and mirrors at blind corners
• Speed limits that are enforced, supported by physical measures such as humps or chicanes where needed
• Pedestrian exclusion zones around high-risk operations such as forklift charging and racking aisles during picking

Safe vehicle

• Daily pre-use checks by drivers, with defects reported and acted on
• Planned maintenance for brakes, steering, tyres, lights, horns and warning devices
• Reversing aids where appropriate: cameras, sensors, audible alarms and flashing beacons
• Seat belts or operator restraints fitted and actually worn, particularly on lift trucks, where a restraint can prevent the fatal instinct to jump from a tipping truck

Safe driver

• Proper training and authorisation for every vehicle type; forklift operators need formal basic training, plus specific and familiarisation training for your site and equipment
• Refresher training at sensible intervals and after incidents or near misses
• Clear site rules for visiting drivers, communicated before or on arrival, in plain language
• Supervision that challenges shortcuts before they become custom and practice

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Reversing: The Persistent Killer

If you fix only one thing, fix reversing. Design it out with one-way systems and drive-through loading where you can. Where reversing is unavoidable, control it: designated reversing areas kept clear of pedestrians, trained banksmen using agreed signals and standing where the driver can always see them, and an absolute rule that if the driver loses sight of the banksman, the vehicle stops.

Do Not Forget the Occasional Traffic

The daily forklift operation usually gets attention. The risks that slip through are the occasional ones: the skip lorry that comes monthly, the visiting tanker, contractors' vans during a refit, delivery drivers wandering across the yard looking for goods-in. Walk your site as a stranger would and see where the gaps are.

Integral Safety carries out workplace transport risk assessments and site layout reviews as part of our health and safety consultancy and auditing services across the East Midlands. Contact us if your yard or warehouse deserves a fresh pair of eyes.