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The design of heavy goods vehicles has evolved over the years, but essentially the big trucks we have now are the same as they were thirty years ago. More stuffed with electronics and driver aids they may be, but they're still big, blunt bricks with an engine at the bottom and a driver at the top.
And it's that configuration which, according to transportation pressure group Transport & Environment (T&E) is putting other road users at risk. Specifically, it's putting pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists at risk simply because the truck driver cannot see them. In fact, according to T&E, the worst-performing trucks on the road have blind spots 2.5-square metres around the cab, and a cyclist or pedestrian has to be as far away as 2.7 metres from the cab for a driver to be able to see them properly.
"Every year 4,000 Europeans die in truck crashes leaving many more seriously injured" says a report by T&E. "Because of their weight, size and their poor, brick shaped design trucks' safety impact is disproportionate. With just three per cent of vehicles, trucks are involved in 15 per cent of road deaths. A quarter of truck fatalities are vulnerable road users. In 2013, 978 cyclists and pedestrians died in an accident involving a truck. Overall the number of vulnerable road user fatalities in the EU is decreasing much slower than the total fatality decrease."
According to the report, 43 per cent of fatal accidents in Belgium involving a cyclist, also involved a truck. In some cities, such as London, that number spikes to 50 per cent, mostly because of the closer proximity and greater density of the two road users. And it's a problem that's likely to get worse. According to T&E "a combination of urbanisation, policies to promote cycling and walking, the rise of e-commerce and continued construction and development in and around cities means that this will become a bigger problem."
There is a solution and it lies in design. Already, there are some trucks (such as the Scania PN3 cab) which have, effectively, no blind spot at all and others, such as the low-cab Mercedes Econic, which have only minimal blind spots. In those cases it's because the driver is mounted lower and farther back in the cab, bringing him or her closer to the level of other road users.
Traditionally, the driver has been mounted high up above the road for simple space efficiency. European regulation has traditionally limited the overall length of truck and trailer combos, in order to preserve road space and prevent the proliferation of super-long road trains. The truck makers' response has been, as with city centre architects, to build up. Shove the engine as far forward as possible, stack the cab and controls high up above and you maximise the length of the trailer which is, after all, the bit of the truck that earns the money to pay for the rest.
Currently, there is a proposal on the table to allow trucks to grow by 800 to 900mm in length, which many believe will be swallowed up by an extended trailer length, but which T&E is arguing should be used to redesign the cabs to move the driver forward and down, and to improve the exterior visibility of the cab.
"The extra design space creates multiple opportunities for improvement, one of which is direct vision. A 2014 briefing by Transport & Environment, based on research by the Loughborough Design School suggested that by redesigning big tractor cabs you could improve their direct vision performance by 50 per cent. A preparatory report by the UK's Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) identified truck frontal design as one of the major areas where safety could be improved. TRL estimates safer frontal design (better vision plus better crash performance) could save up to 900 lives annually."
The European Commission is due to publish initial recommendations in the area at the end of this summer, and a putative date of 2028 has been suggested for the introduction of the new regulations, but T&E says that the requirements should instead be gradually phased in, starting as soon as possible. The lengthy lead times are seen as necessary for the industry though, as heavy trucks are enormously expensive and need a long shelf life to recoup that massive investment.
Such wrangling doesn't bode well for the safety of pedestrians and cyclists now, though. What can we do to try and improve safety standards starting today? Sadly the answer appears to be not much. Eoin Bannon is the Irish representative for T&E and he told us that "retrofitting is not really commercially viable - you could fit doors with more glass and perhaps change the design of the dashboard but this will only increase visibility to a certain extent. And it's expensive. Only lowering the position of the driver will give radical improvements to visibility and this is not possible by retrofitting as the engine is underneath the driver. Plus hauliers typically keep a truck for three-to-five years, or a little longer for urban delivery trucks, and then sell them on, so the investment required for retrofitting is not attractive."
Thankfully, hauliers do seem to be cognisant of the dangers and the potential for improvements. The International Road Transport Union (IRU) has previously called for trucks that are both safer and cleaner, so at least both sides of the argument are pulling in the same direction. In fact, it's that combination of cleaner and safer that might eventually end the argument. If trucks can move away from big, space-inefficient diesel engines and towards either electric or hydrogen fuel cell power, then many of the issues could be eliminated at a stroke. In the meantime, watch your step...