Benchmarking: Road safety can learn a lot from our railways

A new Fleet Benchmarking tool hopes to emulate the safety success achieved in the rail industry by drawing on lessons learned from rail’s experience of benchmarking, including data-gathering, analysis, decisive action and effective collaboration.

April marks the first opportunity for UK businesses to test the new tool, which officially launched at the end of March following months of behind-the-scenes development.

Funded by the Department for Transport (DfT), in partnership with Driving for Better Business, Fleet News and Roadsafe, the new tool overhauls the way that fleet managers, company directors and business owners measure their individual road safety and environmental performance against other organisations.

The rail industry put extensive benchmarking procedures in place decades ago, delivering huge improvements in safety. 

Tavid Dobson, lead safety management systems specialist at the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) and a key member of the new Fleet Benchmarking advisory panel, says there are lessons to be learned for the fleet programme, including the importance of obsessive data-gathering, laser-sharp analysis, acting decisively on the results of the analysis and, above all, promoting effective collaboration. 

“Railways are years ahead of roads on safety, but they had one major advantage,” says Dobson. “It’s a closed system. Unlike the road network, we know about every movement of every train.” 

It is revealing that between 2009 and 2019, there were 20 workforce fatalities in the UK rail industry – and half of those occurred on the roads.