 Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are. Thank you for joining us for our presentation today as we cover toll NQX talks, heavy vehicle safety. Our presenter today is Greg Smith, and I'll talk a little bit more about Greg later on. This webinar is the first of a series of webinars by the National Road Safety Partnership Program, which is of course supported by Safe Work Australia. My name is Angela Yuhas and I'll be your webinar moderator today. Before I introduce Greg to you, I'll introduce Jerome Kastlik, who is the manager of the NRSPP. Just to give a bit of an introduction on it. Thank you, Angela. NRSPP has been an initiative that's been created over the last three years. It sort of came out as the National Transport Commission. Following extensive consultation, we had a range of organisations which you can sort of see up on your screen now, one of them including Toll, all stepped up and basically helped provide the framework and developed the structure of the programs and moved forward. The real goal of the program is to really help drive road safety in businesses and organisations, workplaces of all sizes, but at the same time to increase productivity, efficiency and environmental measures at the same time. So we're liking that ARV sort of was selected over the last few sort of months by the Steering Committee to manage the program, to take it forward. And probably one of the key things to make a point here is all the sort of program members are part of it, mainly because they sort of recognise that road safety shouldn't be a competitive advantage, but rather a shared advantage. Because if some issue happens in their sector, the whole industry is vilified in the view of the public. So thank you very much. True right, Jerome. Thank you for that introduction. Now, without any further comment from me, the man of the moment that everyone's keen to hear from is of course Greg Smith, who is the general manager over at Toll NQX. Greg has over 30 years experience in the transport industry, starting out as a truck driver, and now managing Toll NQX. Quite the background you have there, Greg. Greg, could you tell us a little bit more about your journey through the transport sector? Certainly. Thank you for that. I was originally from a small country Victorian town, and as such, you find yourself driving trucks and heavy vehicles at a young age on farms and things like that. So I started, I entered the industry in that area. Then there was a natural progression into driving, and had a fair bit of experience on road. And my interest was always in trying to make things better. So I took on management roles, and I've had the good fortune to end up with Toll NQX in the role of general manager. Such an inspirational story for all our young professionals starting out in the industry. And I think we're keen to learn more about Toll NQX and your involvement with things. So I'll hand back over to you. Sure. Thank you. Toll NQX is one of the business units inside Toll. We're a national business to business provider. So essentially at the heavy end of the road transport business, we've got three core lines of business that are consolidated. So that's a part load service, a straight line of project services, and a rail business. We have a network of 32 branches, around 1,900 staff, and 2,000 dedicated road services per week. Our road fleet, our lightball fleet, will travel more than 100 million kilometres on the road each year. And that's a big part of the reason why we've had a real safety focus inside our depots, but that's not enough for someone who spends so much time on the road. We need to have a real on-road focus, and that's the path we've gone down. Wow. 100 million kilometres, goodness me. We've taken a bit of an industry leadership role in road safety. We're accredited, of course, with NHBR. As you can see on the screen for mass management, maintenance management, basic fatigue and advanced fatigue. We're also members of Fun TruckSafe, which is essentially a quality management system specifically designed for the transport industry. And our national lightball manager, John King, was recently awarded the industry excellence award from the QTA for helping make Australia's road-prope industry safer. John's been an advocate for roads, for on-road safety for all of the 15 years that I've been inside the business, and he's been a real driving force inside our business for improvement. The business of NQX, you can see on the screens the sort of customers we have, so they're at the higher end or the larger end of industry. They've got a very clear understanding of their responsibilities on the chain of responsibility, but also the fact that we represent them on-road, and they're very interested in what we're doing on-road and how that reflects back on them. So our aim is to reach best practice in the industry, and that's reflection for our customers on the way they're engaging with the community. Firstly, we'll talk about speed management, and to give you a little bit of a context on that, I thought what we would do is just give you an example of the sort of distances our drivers are travelling. The average Australian travels around 14,000 km per year. The average total NQX light-haul driver is up around 220,000 km per year. So their exposure to the hazards of the road is far greater than the average driver, and that's very much worth keeping in mind as we go through this process. The exposure that they have is so great, but the rules they work to are, of course, exactly the same as anybody else. A little bit of a challenge for you, if you like. No need to give you, no need to pronounce her, of course, but if you think about the drive to work this morning, the way we measure our one-speed events is any speed event that exceeds four seconds. So would you have travelled at the speed limit on your way to work this morning for over four seconds? It's an interesting thought. That's the way we measure our drivers. The document you see in front of you, that's the report that I get on a monthly basis. That essentially tells me how many events we have for what period of time and at what speed. And what you'll notice on there is that we've achieved our goal where we have no speed events, over 110 km an hour in the 10 to 10-plus section. So our overall goal is no speed events at all, but for the size of the fleet we have, we're really proud of this position and it's a constant work in progress. One of the interesting things with this is that what we see is when new drivers join us, we typically see a spike in speed events. And when we sit with them and spend some time with them and explain to them further what it is that we want, which is pretty much explained at the original interview and employment process, when we work with them, we almost always get them to understand what we're looking for and you'll see their speed events proper way. So we not only have it like this, this is a summary that I see. We actually have it by driver as well. Well, those results are certainly something to be proud of, Grant. Thank you. Now I've covered most of this, I think, but essentially you can see what's on the screen. So over 70% of the events were between 104 and 106 and for under 10 seconds. The speed depends over 10 seconds, so that's reached zero, so we're very, very happy with that. But the managing speed has been a journey. We're proud of the point we reached, especially considering these drivers travelling 18,000 kilometres per month. It's a big ask, but the driver's doing a wonderful job. Into the prevention. So the next part of our presentation is around one of the initiatives we've been working on for a number of years now, which is in vehicle cameras. We began working with the in vehicle cameras or trying to source cameras for five years ago. And it took us two years to be able to find cameras that actually did what it was we wanted, but also what the vendors were saying they could do. So we've now got over 140 total NQX Prime Movers that are fitted with cameras. The camera constantly record in a loop, and what that means is they just... It's a constant recording loop, and they record and dump after a period of time, so there's no long-term recording that's kept. The recording that is kept is activated by a G-force events, so harsh braking, swerving, can even be a pothole or driver activated. The recording provides vision and audio of both the road and in-cap. The camera footage includes eight seconds prior and four seconds after activation. The system is monitored by a third-party provider who reviews all events and provides email assessment of their safety observations. The good thing with the cameras, the drivers have accepted those quite well, and a big part of that is the fact that they can actually activate the cameras for us. So if the driver sees an event that's happening on road and is concerned or thinks, geez, we should know what's happening there, he can actually activate that for us, and he can come and have a talk to his supervisor when he's returned to Deadline. With the cameras, all drivers and managers participating in the process work with the Code of Conduct. This is designed to ensure proper custody of distribution of few film whilst maintaining a strict recognition of driver privacy. Without that there, I'm sure we would have had a much more difficult time in introducing the technology. The driver acceptance has been very, very high. Most of our drivers accept the camera technology and are very comfortable with it because they see both sides. We've had a number of times where the driver has been protected by the vision the camera has been able to provide, and that's been fantastic. Some of the drivers are not comfortable. We're not everything suits everybody, but it's a part of what we do and it's a part of working with us. Most of our drivers are actually strong advocates of the cameras because they do understand the benefits that they bring. Absolutely, it certainly protects them at the end of the day. So, would you mind taking a few questions, Greg? No, happy to do that. All right, we'll start with how are the trucks speeding if there are speed limiters? Yeah, it's an interesting question. We get that one quite a bit. Most of our speed events are actually downhills. The speed limiter, it limits the speed of the vehicle under power, but has no impact on a speed coming down a hill, and there's also a thing where once it gets to speed, it can actually run a little bit faster than what the speed limit is. That's unusual. It's more down a hill. Caroline from Brake asks, if drivers are speeding, at what point do you pull up drivers on it and what measures do you have in place for addressing the speeding issue? We wait until the vehicle exceeds over 104 kilometres an hour and even then it's over a couple of seconds. So the event must be over 104 and over four seconds. That's the point where we'll actually have a conversation with the driver and what it's all about is we're really trying to get the drivers to understand what they're trying to achieve and to adopt that themselves. So it's a counselling session, not necessarily the summary session. Fair enough. Okay. A question here from Christopher. Christopher's from Limbox and he asks, Greg, can you tell us about the issues you experienced in installing DriveCam into your fleet? Any advice for other operators? Okay. We didn't really get too much opposition because we put them into our line hall fleet up in North Queensland and it's fair to say there are a fair number of events up there. We explained the opportunity for the operator to trigger the camera and the drivers were fairly keen on that part of it. So there was a little bit of trepidation from some of them. There was the concept of Chief Brig Brother is watching. They're going to see everything I'm doing. When we explained that no, that's not right. There's no kept for each other than the eight seconds before and four seconds after an event. That gave them a real level of comfort. The code of conduct was key also so that there's an understanding of how the information we dealt with from a privacy perspective and that opportunity for the operator to record. So we didn't get a lot of pushback. We put it into our line hall fleets in the North first and then rolled down through the rest of the country. I think consultation was the big piece explaining to the drivers what the benefits were to them as well as to the business bought them on board. So the key piece of advice I would give would be to clearly explain to the drivers what it is you're doing and what it is you're trying to achieve and that consultation space. Just taking a little bit further, Gary of West Farmers Clean asks, how long did the consultative process take you? We probably worked through a period of around three or four months. We knew we'd been looking for them for two years prior to that we actually found some that were going to work and we put a few pilot cameras in so the drivers were a part of that pilot process. So they were seeing what was happening and they were aware on the way through. So I guess that would have been over a reasonably long period, three or four months and that's to do as much as anything else with the pilot and then the actual implementation. So we had that opportunity to consult over a fair period of time and we just made sure the drivers were involved. And how do drivers react when they see their own footage? Their own accident footage? Well, it's mixed. One of the things that's really interesting is often, more often than not the driver's memory of the event is quite different to what the footage says and I'm no psychologist but what we think that is is that the brain is focused on the issue and driving the vehicle not on remembering exactly what happened. So the drivers can get quite a surprise when they actually see what's happened as opposed to what they thought happened. So it can be quite different. On the other side of things, just the other week we had a piece of footage of one of our drivers hit a pod hole and it's triggered the camera. He's realised it would and so whereas it's triggered he's gone, whoops! And he actually said, oh that'll trigger it and he's given the camera a big smile and wave. So we've showed him that piece and he got quite a laugh out of it. Aww. There are some good news stories then. Well there's actually a lot of good news stories and the big ones of the good news stories is where there have been on-road incidents and the drivers can be exonerated very, very quickly. We had an event quite recently where one of our drivers was involved in an incident and the police understood we had the cameras in there, asked for the footage. We had the camera, we went through our normal privacy process and we had the footage within about 25 minutes to 30 minutes and the driver was clear that quickly. Now that's great for the driver. There's no period of uncertainty. He knows he'd done everything he could do and he was okay. So there's a lot of good news stories in the cameras. Wow. Fantastic. Alright Greg, I'll let you move to the next stage of the presentation. Okay, the next piece is some actual camera footage. So we've got to get set from the drivers for all of these and some of these are G4s activated but some are actually driver activated as well. So what we'll do, as each one comes through, I'll give you a little bit of a running commentary but I'll leave the video speak for itself. So I'll say a few words before and we might run through each of them twice. Good plan. Okay, so there's what the camera footage looks like when we see it. So the image on the left is looking inside the vehicle. The one on the right is looking down the road. So that's fairly clear. We need each example. What you find is you get distracted. You will look at one screen or the other. So I'll give you a bit of a heads up. On this one, we had a driver who was looking to get something out of the fridge and this has occurred on the British Highway north of Brisbane. It's a G4s activated. Essentially he's taken his eyes off the road for only a couple of seconds and that was enough for him to lose control. So if you look mainly to the left of the screen, you'll see what's happening with the driver. So if you look into the video, if you look to the right you'll see an oncoming vehicle and you can only imagine how frightening it would have been for that person. So that's essentially a roll, a classified as a roll over for us. The vehicle didn't go over on its side but it certainly was over on an angle. It's off road. That pretty much destroyed the primary of one of the trailers. Fortunately the driver was fine. There were some visibility seat belts so you can see that that's on plus the arms were down on the driver's seat. So the good news is there were no injuries out of all of that. The bad news is it was very, very expensive. So would you like to look at the game? Yeah, absolutely. Let's do that. And look, I have seen these before but I tell you what, they scare me every time. So they are an incredibly effective training tool personally for our drivers because it's our drivers who are in there. Let's understand. I do squirm in my seat every time. This one here this shows how quickly things happen and why it's so critical that drivers are fresh and focused, not distracted at all. This is again on the Bruce Highway. The camera was activated by our driver's swerving. We did share this with the Department of Transport and Main Road to assist with their understanding but also just as a bit of further information for them. The driver coming towards us really don't know what has happened or what was going inside that truck. We can only assume, but fortunately our driver was well aware and able to react. So he'll mainly the right screen. So our driver is not a lot happening but you look at the right screen and you'll see what's happening. Alright, let's take a look. You might just run that one through once more. If you look at the right screen again but if you look at the bottom right hand corner you'll notice the speed is there. Now because it's GPS speed it's a little bit slower than the real world. So our driver has unfortunately seen what's coming moved off to the left and actually brake quite sharply to keep out of the way. But this is a frightening event. And that's how quickly it happens. Oh gosh. That whole thing was 12 seconds of footage only and I guess the event itself is probably 3 or 4 seconds of that. That's how quickly it happens. Okay, we'll move to the next one. This one is a motorist and he's clearly in a hurry. This is between two of our trucks on the Bruce Fireway again. Driver activated. Again our drivers both are focused on what's going on and both of them actually brake and move to the side to allow this to let the driver get through. So let this one go. So keep an eye on the right screen again. Do you know what amazes me about that? The driver's face doesn't even change. It's like he's seen this before. He's used to other drivers and road users making these kinds of silly decisions. And that's a big part of why the drivers have accepted the cameras so well because they are seeing this every day. If there's anybody out there who has a fleet of vehicles on the road doesn't think this is happening to their people then honestly, they're just mistaken. Our drivers are very cool and very calm and this is what they're seeing on a regular basis. They don't want to quick their game. And what you'll notice is both of our trucks have to move over and the one that we watch on the camera actually slows down. So our driver just puts it back on the road and just continues on. Isn't this as usual? Wouldn't be too extreme to suggest that's a near-death moment. And unfortunately, it is just business as usual. This one is on the Flings Highway so west of Townsville. So it's one of our road trains heading out west. This is again, again, activated by the driver. And our driver has reduced speed, moved to the left, but look mainly again at the right-hand screen. So you can see our driver reach up and activate the camera. Now, he's seen that car fortunately coming in his mirrors. So he's not just aware of what's in front of him. He's actually doing the right thing. He's keeping an eye on his trailer set, looking behind him. He's seen that coming behind him. And you can see the truck coming towards him. The other road train places life so he's actually seeing what's going on also. So just want to run that one through again. Absolutely. I'm sure that's not lost honestly. That was across double lines. It really illustrates just how professional there's so much more going on than just what a lot of people think these vehicles are driving the truck. Absolutely. There is so much more to it. Well, that fellow there with the road train sets, he'll be keeping an eye on the trailer of the mirrors just to keep an eye on everything that's going on. And that's what they need to do. They cannot be distracted because again, you can see through this piece as a footage there's just a couple of seconds. That's how quickly you cannot be distracted when you're all driving these vehicles. This one here is in Mackay. So it's in town and Mackay is just pulled up in one of one of our trucks and then done only a U-turn. We have no idea what he was thinking as the crash had happened. The car stopped but then just took off. We actually gave the police this footage and they're trying to see what they can do from that. What's the driver hurt? What was he thinking? No, he hit the very back corner of the car so there wasn't a lot of damage to the car. There was a small mark on our truck but the really good thing there is our driver comes back in, reports to his supervisor and says listen, I've just had a crash. I don't know what's going on. The cars continued on but there's the mark on the truck. So there's no uncertainty. It's not a matter of really what to do. We actually know exactly what the driver has done. We know what's going on and our driver has done everything he can do. It's a 50km zone. He's travelling at 50km. He's hit the brakes. There's nothing he could have done differently to what he did. Let's have a look at that one again. I've done some silly things in my home group but doing a U-turn in front of a truck is not one of them. Difficult to imagine he couldn't have seen it coming. They are bright green and they really do stand out. They certainly do. Oh gosh. Okay, so some of our learnings and insights. Definitely our incident rate has decreased. People's have is falling and that's been a very very positive result from this. We do have an incident. The we understand what's going on very very quickly. It makes the investigation so much easier and it provides certainty to what the root cause is. There's a group initiative where we're working in partnership with the Monarch University to formally research driver behaviours with a view to working with equipment supplies to optimise cabin layouts. That's all around what we've found about distractions. What we don't want is drivers having to look around cabs to find a radio to find a station on the radio or to change a CD. We want to make sure that everything is in the driver's line of sight and easy to get to. Steering wheel controls. Absolutely critical. Drink holders need to be in front of the driver so he doesn't have to reach into a refrigerator. He can actually before he starts off get his drink out of his refrigerator put that in his drink holder and then he's got that for his next driving spell. So we're doing a lot of work on that. The sort of improvements we've seen it's an industry issue where drivers don't like wearing seat belts. There's a comfort perception. Yeah that's out there. With what we see we're able to talk to our drivers about wearing the seat belts following too close, cornering too fast using handheld devices. It's not just motorists it's a community issue where people don't seem to be able to leave their phones alone and eating and drinking while driving. So we're seeing all of those things and we're able to just talk with our drivers and just counsel them and try and find better ways to do what we need them to do and explain to them it's all about making sure that they're not distracted so that they can actually respond to what's happening in their immediate environment. Seeing the footage is that what really helps in changing the attitude? Yes it does. Absolutely. And then seeing the footage of their own workmates if this is just stock footage from somewhere else it's a bit like the ads on television they can have an impact but it's not personal. This is quite personal because our drivers know who it was that was involved and they can talk to it and say there's not so much footage what actually happened there and so it's much more personal and we find that makes a real difference. Absolutely. Sharing our learnings with our team what we do is we've got a fairly broad spread of drivers located all across the country so it's not always easy to get to them so what we do is we have an update program where we just send these sorts of very quick but brief notes out just letting them know this is what we're seeing or she's sharing some of our learnings with them this one here was the Christmas one just basically saying it's Christmas coming make sure whether you're working or whether you're just taking your family somewhere make sure you're playing your route make sure that you've got respirates in there and be aware that there's a lot more traffic on the road and a lot more incidents can happen. Absolutely. I was asked to provide a couple of tips what we would see from the information that we've got there's just some tips for general motorists our top tips would be and these are supported by the videos I think we've just seen only overtake when you're absolutely positive that it's safe to do so following this tip will save lives I think it's much better I think we would all agree we'd rather get there five or ten minutes late than not at all. Tip two, the truck driver will often deliberately try and maintain some space between the truck and the vehicle in front if he needs that little bit of extra space just for the slowing down and just to try and keep the flow of traffic moving so just be mindful of that before cutting and enforcing them to emergency braking and tip three, hold back from heavy vehicles while they're turning they do need space that's an interesting one it's been around for an awful lot of years and I think it's even on the license testing now these days I believe where people try and sneak up the inside so that would be my top tips well many trucks do actually have that signage on the back of them that should all have it why people ignore the message I don't know alright and it looks like we might take a few more questions fantastic alright we'll start with one from Anthony from ARV is asking is toll saving historical data for the purpose of identifying high-risk locations, trends and common driver behaviours in order to make their further improvements in safety yeah we cut out the information that we get and we do look for any particular areas of road that we can pass on to the Department of Main Rows or whichever state that that's in so we do cut out the information we do look for trends whether they be trends between vehicles whether they be trends of locations or even drivers what percentage of incidents is the fault of the other sort of vehicles would you say it's hard to put a firm figure to but in almost every occasion we find that our drivers have done the right thing so it's a very small amount where our drivers have actually done something wrong please ignore Tom from the US Federal Highway Administration is asking has there been benefits realised with the insurance rates so liability appears quite easy to determine in these cases shared yeah not for us as toll because of the way I guess that we would insure but I am familiar with a contractor who has had a beta insurance rate provided to him by his insurer who we got these cameras from they were being used in New Zealand quite successfully and in New Zealand the insurers picked up the cameras and started requesting that their customers could have them so not for us necessarily but yes anecdotally I can say that that's my understanding Brenton of the Demorridge probably limited what is the cost for these camera units per vehicle don't have that on me but it is actually on the NRS PP website I think it's around about $1000 per camera and about a $90 per month fee which might sound like a lot but it's not in the context of the value of the vehicle and the value of the cost of an incident relating to the vehicle but that's actually on the website more specifically absolutely look I think it's a small price to pay anything for the game and we will have some contact details up in a few slides time so if anyone does want to ask more questions regarding that they can possibly follow up absolutely that would be fine great one more question here David's asking does the introduction of cameras mean that toll has a recruitment selection bias and therefore high as better drivers I'd like to think so I'd really like to think so but no I don't think the cameras do that for us so much we certainly make it clear before anybody joins us that about our speed limiting and our speed monitoring and our cameras that we run so if drivers have any issues there's a real opportunity for them then to decide whether they want to join us or not so no I wouldn't suggest we've got any better recruitment process due to the cameras but I think we end up with a better driver and what I've based that on is when we get drivers come to us they almost all start out having speed incidents and by working with them and providing them the information we find that they drop off our speed reports very quickly typically it's a two to three month process so I would suggest we end up with a better driver we don't necessarily start with a better driver fantastic we have some contact details up on the screen there if you have any further questions that come to mind or the toll group website is there also for further information Greg thank you so much for your time in joining us here in the Webinar Studio today and what an amazing story quite the inspiration you are to all young professionals starting out in the industry so thank you for sharing your story and that of toll ok well thank you very much for that and I appreciate the kind words