Australian truckers looking at range of new safety features
While my trucking litigation law practice is in Atlanta, Georgia, I know that long haul trucking safety is not just an American issue. With the long distances between populations centers in Australia, all the challenges facing American truckers are big deals there too. Driver fatigue, for example, is every bit as big a problem for Aussie "truckies" as for American truckers.
At the Australian Trucking Convention this week in Canberra, which includes the ATA Safety Summit, FleetSafe is exhibiting a range of trucking safety technologies, including:
- video based event recorders
- in-vehicle black box monitoring systems
- trailer reversing cameras
- wireless CCTV systems
- electronic tire inspection tools
- RFID tire tracking and fuel management systems.
The Shigley Law Firm represents plaintiffs in wrongful death and catastrophic injury cases arising from motor carrier accidents statewide in Georgia. Recently elected Secretary of the State Bar of Georgia, Ken Shigley has been designated as a "SuperLawyer" in Atlanta Magazine and one of the "Legal Elite" in Georgia Trend Magazine. He is a Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy, and former chair of both the Southeastern Motor Carrier Liability Institute and the Georgia Insurance Law Institute. He focuses on cases arising from truck wrecks and accidents (tractor trailers truck wrecks, bus wrecks, semi truck wrecks,18 wheeler truck wrecks, big rig truck wrecks, log truck wrecks, dump truck wrecks.
I agree that the conference will be important as there are many high profile speakers but the issue of fatigue in the trucking industry has been given a run for several years and it is an issue that needs to be addressed, now, to the wider sector.
To my mind the more important safety elements of the conference are before the fatigue discussion - in the sessions that lead to the state of fatigue. Manage these and fatigue does not exist.
The most significant and durable solutions to fatigue come from the reorganisation of the delivery process to acknowledge the human behind the steering wheel and not just the truck delivering the goods.
