In recent years, highway work and maintenance has increasingly been carried out at night. This minimizes disruption to traffic flows and road diversions, with clear benefits for those using the road network. Due to poor visibility and fatigue, this has serious consequences for the night shifts that carry out the work.
There are always risks associated with road works. Research has shown that more than half of the incidents take place within the work area itself. The majority of accidents and injuries are caused by a moving vehicle.
Blind spots on vehicles are one of the leading causes of collisions and are often the main reason road workers are killed or injured. Limited visibility due to working at night, dusty job sites and bad weather make this problem even worse. In addition, road workers often have to wear hearing protection, which means they can’t always hear approaching vehicles.
However, vehicle safety systems can address this problem. Passive systems such as mirrors and cameras can show the driver objects in the vehicle’s blind spot, while active systems, including operator alerts and reversing alarms, ensure that drivers are immediately warned that an object or person is near the vehicle. vehicle is located. Pedestrians immediately know that a vehicle is nearby.
“Such active safety systems are critical to assist drivers and improve the safety of people working in these conditions. Therefore, for ultimate safety, we always recommend that vehicles be equipped with a combination of both passive and active systems, such as cameras and alarms,” says Huib Slijkhuis of Brigade Electronics, a company that specializes in vehicle safety.
One of these safety solutions is the Backeye 360, which gives the driver a complete picture of the environment around the vehicle in real time and in a single view. The system combines images from several ultra-wide-angle cameras, resulting in a real-time panoramic view of the vehicle and its surroundings, so drivers can clearly see people and objects while maneuvering.
Active technology, such as radar-based obstacle detection, can detect stationary and moving objects even under the most difficult conditions and in the dark and warns the driver with an audible and visual signal of objects at a certain distance from the vehicle.
Radar systems for use in harsh environments work even at high and low temperatures, are watertight and smoke resistant and the alarm is clearly audible even in noisy environments. This makes them ideal for use on construction sites.
The British company Day Aggregates has installed safety technology in all its vehicles. All loaders, telehandlers and trucks were equipped with the robust Backsense radar sensor system.
“Radar offers you a helping hand when you have to look in a lot of mirrors and use aids when reversing. If you are distracted, for example because someone suddenly calls you over the radio, you may be trying to process too much information at once. The radar system prevents that. There is a screen in the cab that shows you different colors and beeps when someone or something is within a certain radius of the vehicle. So it’s not just visual prompts, but also audible warnings,” said operator Darren Harfield.