Forklift safety, traffic engineering and intelligent transport systems: a case study

This paper details a forklift safety demonstration project undertaken at two manufacturing sites in Victoria, Australia. The purpose of the work was both to help improve safety at the two sites, and, more broadly, to develop, help implement and evaluate a series of human-centred design interventions involving vehicles and pedestrian workers. The 'before' and 'after' case study presented here summarises the background to the research and introduces the test sites. Thereafter, it describes the overall nature of the safety interventions proposed and introduces the methods developed to assess safety. For the traffic engineering interventions, positive safety results were found in terms of reductions in the number of potentially hazardous interactions involving forklifts. Similarly, for the vehicle interventions, the research found that forklift drivers and managers considered the newly developed and installed Intelligent Transport Systems to be broadly acceptable in operational conditions, and the systems' intended safety benefits were well understood. The results are discussed and conclusions are drawn regarding human factors aspects of forklift safety.