When it comes to bus and motorcoach safety, most advice focusing on compliance comes up short on the day-to-day challenges of operating a fleet, says Stephen Evans, a transportation safety expert.
That’s because the material is borrowed from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guides geared more toward traditional worksites than commercial vehicles, said Evans, who joined a recent UMA Town Hall to talk about safety strategies.
Evans is the former vice president of safety for the Pacific Western Group of Companies, which has more than 70 locations and a combined fleet of more than 5,000 vehicles. Over the course of his career, he has become a well-known transportation safety expert, writer and facilitator. Now, he advises companies on how to reduce their number of vehicle collisions.
Useful as coaches
He is also the architect of Pacific Western’s book, Our Journey to World Class Safety. The book provides an overview of how the transportation giant accomplished that objective.
Because human error is normal, inevitable and almost never intentional, safety staff should not be tasked with discipline, Evans advises. Instead, the safety team is more useful in the role of a coach, helping everyone make safety a priority.
“It’s really not very effective to expect that safety is only the realm of safety staff,” he said. “It really needs to be owned by all of the people who are actually on the field doing the work,” from dispatch to sales to maintenance.
Avoid shotgun approach
Evans also suggests businesses avoid a shotgun approach when it comes to safety. Instead, he said, they should focus on a very specific safety target, then put all of their energy, time and resources toward accomplishing that goal. They’ll make more progress by just fixing one thing at a time.
Evans has found that organizations that hold regular small group safety meetings tend to have fewer accidents and safety incidents.
“Success in safety comes from simple, small, one-by-one steps, day after day,” he said. “They may be rather ordinary and unimpressive but, over an extended time, the results can be spectacular.”
Watch Evans’ entire Town Hall presentation.
