Tag: transport

Mindset

Safety is a mindset. Having a sense of risks and which ones to accept and which to reject is something we all develop. It’s a big part of childhood. Most of us have had burns, cuts or bruises that have resulted in doing something we would now consider having been stupid.

Some are destined to be over-cautious, and others are more openly adventurous. In time, we settle around a frame of thinking that suites us best. That’s fine in so far as taking personal risk is concerned. Whether to cross the street every time you see a mean looking dog or to buy a powerful motorcycle later in life that’s a personal preference.

Where activities, positive or negative only impact the risk taker then that’s an area where society shouldn’t be too heavy handed. Naturally, there are boundaries. The classic one is motorcycle crash helmets. Mandating them led to a lot of heated debate. Yes, we are discussing a personal risk in respect of the rider but the risk to society is an unacceptable number of fatalities, brain injuries and publicly borne health care costs.

There I was, driving at less than the regulation speed (yes, I was) eastward on the M25 motorway. The details are stamped on a picture taken by my neat little Garmin dashcam. What’s in the picture? It’s a moveable building sitting on the back of a lorry. Nothing unusual about a lorry transporting stuff from A to B. What I saw was a large building on a relatively small lorry. When first seeing something like this on a busy road, my instinct is to give it a very wide margin.

The rectangular building was rocking gently. It was not a windless day. Not overly windy but a strong gusty breeze was blowing. Clear skies and dry tarmac. So, good driving conditions for a normal lorry with a normal load on a normal day. I’d estimate that this lorry was doing about 80km/hr. It wouldn’t be too difficult to do the sums in terms of the wind resistance of the building. It’s going to be significant. A large flat surface being pushed through the air at motorway speeds. As for sidewinds and gusts, this is a horrendous monster.

Back to safety being a mindset. My thought was – what on earth gave the carriers the idea that this arrangement for a wide load was a safe one for a motorway journey? No escort vehicle. No flashing lights. Just a couple of small red triangles. The straps and wooden blocks holding the load in place looked feeble. A powerful gust of wind on an exposed stretch of road and who knows what would have happen next. It wouldn’t have been pretty. I hope they got to their destination without incident.

Had this been done on private land then there would have been little public risk. Being done on a busy motorway – that’s a different matter. How do people convince themselves that such transport arrangements will be fine? I speculate:

  • Money. Maybe the haulage contractor undercut rivals to get the job. Maybe using a small lorry and ditching any escort vehicle saved money. Maybe there was time pressure and this was all that was available.
  • Bravado: A carrier imagines they have special skills and abilities so they can take risks that others would not take. Something uniquely puts them above others in the field. This cock-sure attitude is not uncommon.
  • Short Cuts. I’ve heard this argument used before – we did it last time and it worked, so we’ll do it again. That learned deviance is the source of many accidents. Past and present can have very different outcomes.
  • Shoulder shrugging: I’ve heard this argument used too – it’s legal, it’s within the rules so it can’t be wrong, can it? (The load maybe within the approved weight limits for the lorry. There may be no explicit rule on shape and size).

A good safety mindset means saying “no” when no is the right answer. All three of the above points can come into play and produce a toxic mix. Such is the way accidents happen. It doesn’t have to be this way but it often is. Before a critic says don’t be so high and mighty – yes, I’ve done foolish things too.

NOTE: The loading rules HGV maximum weights – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Safety

A considerable part of my working life has been in the analysis of occurrence data and trying to distiller the factors that cause or contribute to accidents and incidents. It’s rewarding work. An opportunity to influence that has value. I subscribe to the dictum that everything we do should contribute to continuous improvement in safety. Not zero risk but to keep risks low and under control, in so much as it’s possible.

Aviation only has the great success that it does because it’s a safe industry. For mass transport by air to be viable across the globe, the public must have confidence in it. They are willing to place whole families in the care of an airline to get them from London Gatwick to the Canary Islands for something that is not a physical need[1]. Regular leisure travel is a luxury and a privilege. We live in a fortunate age when overseas travel can be afforded by a large section of the population.

I watched the recent documentary on flight MH370. It’s sobering. It’s a story of the loss of a large aircraft that still seems unbelievable in this era. It’s the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370 on 8 March 2014. The loss is a stark reminder that the oceans cover over 70% of the surface of the Earth. We know less about parts of the oceans than we do about the surface of Mars. The depths remain uncharted.

With a paucity of evidence theories have taken root. Official investigation reports are available. However, mystery remains particularly when it comes to answering the question – why? If as the documentary suggest, the willful actions of the pilot-in-command brought about the fatal outcome then there’s little to tell of his motivation. Highlighting the tragic Germanwings aviation accident doesn’t offer anything other than a context to possibilities. Evidence that the MH370 pilot-in-command was suicidal is scant. Although his known actions do not make much sense without invoking such a theory. Understanding what drives people to purposefully undertake unpredictable and irrational actions is an area of study that always needs attention.

Yesterday, Sunday, I was remined that threats to safety can come out of nowhere. Seemingly routine car journeys can suddenly take a turn in an unexpected direction. We become subject to the fates. I use the word “fate” but I’m not a great believer in the fates. Randomness plays a part but, in this case, yesterday afternoon, I was the subject to the foolish and negligent actions of another car driver.

On a wet “B” road that climbs and descends over chalk hills, there are triangular road signs that warn drivers that the road is a high risk road. What the signs are referring to is the wildlife. A deer may leap out of a roadside hedge at great speed and misjudge the road traffic. In fact, I did see an unfortunate small dead deer at the kerbside.

What happened to me had a purely human cause. Naturally, I would call it complete idiocy. Coming over the brow of a hill, and descending, suddenly there was 4 bright headlights ahead. On a narrow country road, with overgrown banks on either side that was a scary sight. Nowhere to go. In a faction of a second the overtaking car coming up the hill veered back into the right-hand lane. No more than a couple of yards in front of my car. Fortunately, there was no collision. What on earth was the motivation of that driver? Overtaking, at high speed, approaching the brow of a hill, on a wet county road, in poor light, sheer madness. A small red car, overtaking a larger car.

In safety work this points to the most difficult situations to understand. The irrational, or stupid or reckless, or carless human drives that are hard to design out of systems. How do we take effective corrective action when one person’s risk threshold is so very much higher than normal or acceptable? The problem with saying – take their licence away – is that this is always reactive. After a negative event. Maybe even a fatal one.

[1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

HS1 and a bit

John F. Kennedy made speeches that have become legendary. My favourite is: “Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You.[1]” In it he stepped up to meet the challenges of the times with clear purpose. There was no dither or wishy-washy ambiguity. The speech was a signal to the world saying: this is where we stand.

This morning, this is not the speech that I’m thinking of. I mention it because without Kennedy setting the scene in his Inaugural Address of January 1961, then his next steps would have been more difficult. There are epoch changing words. There are few modern words that match these: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.[2]“

In the context of the decision on the future of the HS2 railway project the words “but because they are hard” rings in my ears. In the whole saga of this national railway project did anyone say it would be easy. No one said it would be inexpensive. It was always going to be hard from the start.

If Kennedy had announced just to have a look at the Moon and return. No need to land. And he said that after a strong commitment to land on the Moon had been made, the achievement would not have changed the world. It would have been a footnote in 20th century history because others would have made the first steps on our satellite.

In a country that gave birth to the railways you would imagine that ambition in that field of endeavour would be high. Britain had energy. Britain had innovative engineers. Britain had a technological lead. The early days of the railways fuelled the industrial revolution.

Today, we need a bold and ambitious infrastructure plan in the UK. Living off the legacy of Victorian construction has lasted longer than is wise. Tracks that were set down almost two centuries ago are still the arteries that transport people and goods throughout Britain. Where is the Isambard Kingdom Brunel[3] of the 21st century?

Now, Conservative politicians are attempting to con the country – yet again. The idiotic line that – people don’t travel by train anymore – is insulting and wrong. The thin line that we can do more with our inherited Victorian infrastructure is pitiful. The Prime Minister’s hotch-potch of projects, with no timescales given, are no alternative.

Commitments can be hard to keep. Politicians that make “firm” promises and then back track in the days before a General Election are will-o’-the-wisps. Then to claim that they are working for the long-term is newspeak. Not to be trusted. Infinity forgettable.  

POST 1: Promises to upgrade main roads, that had been already anounced but delayed is not adding transport projects at all.

POST 2: HS2 explained: What is the route now, what are the costs and why is the Manchester leg being axed? | Business News | Sky News

[1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/inaugural-address

[2] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/address-at-rice-university-on-the-nations-space-effort

[3] GWR was designed and built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel between 1835 and 1841 and is regarded as the most complete early railway in the world.

The Week

Conversations can go in a strange direction. It’s well and good to be sceptical. I mean, questioning newspaper headlines, social media hot shots and politician’s pontifications. Lies are common enough, but everything is not a lie. My experience is that most people are honest, straightforward, and reasonable. So, yes, be sceptical but don’t think everything is a conspiracy. The evidence simply doesn’t point that way.

How did this chat kick-off? Surprise, surprise, a conversation about COVID-19. There’s no doubt that a lot of big mistakes were made in the last few years. Balance that fact with the dedication and hard work people put in to mitigating the pandemic and the suffering of those who lost loved ones. It was a crisis that most of us had never experienced. The pains and shocks were real.

When I hear someone say – it wasn’t a real pandemic, you know. Following up with – do you know who was funding the chaos? That question left me with a blank expression. Then an answer, as if this confident speaker had discovered something no one else knew – it was Bill Gates. Although I’d heard this conspiracy theory before it still left me doing a shocked double-take. How can someone be so convinced of such utter nonsense?

I’m a liberal, so I question those who follow a crowd for the sake of following the crowd. On top of that way of thinking, free speech is to be cherished. If my judgment is that the world of conspiracy theories is not new and is just part a colourful world, am I ignoring the harm that untrue utter nonsense can do? It’s a difficult dilemma. When someone gets sucked into conspiracy thinking they become chained to lies but they freely take-up those chains. Is it harmful for people to buy crystals or silver foil hats to protect themselves from the evils of 5G[1]? It certainly is nutty. Maybe, they have a right to be nutty.

Switching subjects. Thundery skies, dusty, a sweaty 25 degrees C and bright shafts of intense sunlight. Lanes full of cars, bikes, buses, trucks, and vans. The writhing unpleasantness that is the M25 motorway. That’s too mild a word. As the song by Chris Rea goes – The Road to Hell[2]. A song made for the M25 that never grows old.

Yesterday, hell was a bad place to be (Not what AC/DC wrote). Stop and go. Stop and go. It was a self-imposed torture sitting in lines of traffic on the country’s longest moving car park. Moving only as an afterthought. I did the 60 miles between the towns of Reigate and Hatfield. That’s almost 180 degrees around London’s circular motorway. From South to North. If it’s not the noisy concrete sections, then it’s the countless number of congested lanes under the Heathrow flight path that are top of my worst list. Grinding slow, mind numbing and an indictment of our failure to take the environment seriously. Transport policy is in a mess.

What’s crazy is our country’s response to this everyday transport pain. Make it bigger and wider. Carve out more of the countryside and cover it with concrete, steel and tarmac. I’m talking about the current work on the A3/M25 interchange at Wisley[3]. Heavy machinery has dug out trees and shifted massive amounts of soil to shape the land to the demands of the internal combustion engine. Add a lane. Fill up a lane. Add another lane. Fill another lane. Build a bridge but never bridge the gap. That been the way of the last 30-years and more. A monster that just keeps eating up more land.

[1] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/cancer-myths/do-mobile-phones-cause-cancer

[2] https://youtu.be/OcW-BSEB3ng

[3] https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-roads/south-east/m25-junction-10/