There are some people that view Safe Urban Driving as a box ticking exercise for their company to maintain compliance, not seeing the real benefits that could be gained as a result of this training.
Safe Urban Driving gives commercial road users the opportunity to learn more about our ever-changing urban environment and how to act around vulnerable road users. The world population grows every year, which indirectly brings new problems that are often not considered by most road users.
With the increased population we see more road users and vehicles on our road every year, these vehicles are on our road for a number of reasons. First of all, the increased population means that there is increased demand for everyday products that we as human use or need to survive, in order to fulfil the increased demand for these items more logistics and transport vehicles are on our roads every day. This leads to increased levels of traffic and slower journeys for people using busy city roads.
All of these external influences have an impact on the likelihood of an incident occurring on our roads. Therefore, the greater focus on how to increase road safety that is prominent in Safe Urban Driving courses is essential for HGV drivers.
As a company we have a number of avid cyclists, we all regularly go out on weekends and cycle for 10 or more miles at a time. We also participate in a yearly 30-mile cycle ride for charity, where we have around 50 employees participating on the early morning cycle ride. Last year on this charity cycle ride, we got to experience all of these elements and why Safe Urban Driving training is important.
We were completing our regular cycle route when a driver unexpectedly collided with one of our members of staff. The driver of the vehicle was turning out of a junction and not aware of our group of cyclists that were travelling along the road, this was a prime example of a driver that was unaware of vulnerable road users, the exact subject that Safe Urban Driving focuses on.
Having one of our own staff involved in an accident while out cycling on a road really emphasized the importance of this course to us, the need to raise of awareness of these issues is evident and something that we can contribute towards.