How to minimise movements of your construction vehicles

On average, each year, about 7 workers die as a result of accidents involving vehicles or mobile plant on construction sites. A further 93 are seriously injured.

By law, you must organise a construction site so that vehicles and pedestrians using site routes can move around safely.

The message is clear: construction site vehicle incidents can and should be prevented by the effective traffic management throughout the construction process.

One of the key issues in dealing with traffic management on site is minimising the movements of your construction vehicles. In this blog, we’ll explain some of the best ways you can do this and provide some actionable advice on how to reduce health and safety risks.

Health and Safety: construction vehicles

As a fleet or transport manager in the construction industry, it is your legal duty and responsibility to protect employees and members of the public, under the General Health and Safety Legislation.

This includes protecting employees and the public from risks associated with workplace transport and construction vehicles.

While the movement of plant, vehicles and people around construction sites is unlikely to appear high on your priority list in terms of health and safety – it does present hazards which need to be controlled just like any other hazards that you may encounter on site.

Vehicles including powered mobile plant moving in and around a workplace, reversing, loading and unloading are often linked with death and injuries to workers and members of the public.

The main activities and operations where you are likely to experience hazards are:

• Getting to and from the site
• Getting in and out of the site
• Moving around the site
• Getting people safely past the site

Managing traffic at a construction workplace is an important part of ensuring the site is operating without any risks to health and safety. Traffic can include cars, trucks and powered mobile equipment like forklifts.

A traffic management plan documents and helps explain how risks will be managed at the construction workplace. The plan should be monitored and reviewed regularly, including after an incident to ensure it is effective, and takes into account any changes at the site.

Part of this plan includes reducing the movement and number of vehicles on site. We explore them below.

Top tips on minimising vehicle movements

Good planning can help to minimise vehicle movement around a site. To limit the number of construction vehicles on site, consider the following:

• Controlling entry of vehicles into the site through gates and barriers.
• Providing parking spaces for visitors and workers away from work areas.
• Scheduling work to minimise the number of vehicles operating in the same area at the same time.
• Locating loading and unloading areas on the periphery of construction sites - planning storage areas in this way means that delivery vehicles do not have to cross the construction site.

Learn more about the common challenges fleet managers face in the construction industry and some valuable advice on fleet implementation by downloading our eBook: