Workplace transport safety An employers' guide - ARRI Lighting Rental

A safe site
The workplace in general
Health and Safety
Executive
238 A well-designed and maintained workplace will make transport accidents less
likely.
239 This guidance should provide enough information for you to recognise
common transport hazards related to the layout and features of the site, and to
think about things you can do to reduce risks resulting from these hazards.
240 Every site is different and each site is likely to present hazards and risks we
do not mention here. These should be recognised in a thorough risk assessment,
and controlled accordingly. Often, small and quite cheap things will make a lot of
difference. You should make sure that lights are adequate and working, potholes
are filled, markings and signs are clear, spills are cleaned up quickly, and so on.
241 You can get more detailed information on site design from other sources,
including the Freight Transport Association guide Designing for Deliveries, 8 other
industry guidance, British Standards Institute publications, and professional civil
engineers and transport planners.
242 If transport is used in a workplace, it is important that vehicles and pedestrians
are kept separate wherever possible, and are able to move around each other and
do their work safely. This is known as ‘segregation’.
243 People do not only need to be segregated from vehicles that are travelling.
They also need to be kept separate from the area that a vehicle moves through
when it is working – for example, the area that the body of an excavator moves
through when it is working.
244 By law, the workplace must be maintained in an efficient state, in efficient
working order and in good repair. ‘Efficient’ here relates to health and safety, not to
productivity or economy.
245 To make sure that a workplace is managed efficiently in this sense, it is
important that those responsible for it have a good understanding of how work is
carried out on site. This will involve understanding how pedestrians and vehicles
use the space around them.
246 When you are thinking about features of your site, it is important that you know
what sort of vehicles move around your site and where they are going. You can then
think about:
n how much room vehicles need to move safely;
n whether pedestrians are kept safely clear of vehicles;
n how much drivers can see when the vehicle is moving; and
n whether drivers can get to and from the driving position safely.
247 As a rule, your site should allow plenty of room for all of the types of vehicle
that are used in the normal course of work to move and work safely. Wherever
possible, you should also allow for other vehicles that might need to move around
the workplace, such as emergency vehicles.
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