Abstract
Postal motorcyclists who regularly conduct deliveries are particularly vulnerable to road accidents since they are exposed to traffic throughout their work day. To reduce accident rates, safety officers in each of the local delivery offices alert postmen of any hazardous conditions that may be conducive to accidents. Although some commercial postal organizations already use tracking technologies (e.g., GPS), Korea Post currently has no systematic way to collect their postmen’s driving behavior except by referring to each postman’s manually recorded daily mileage. In light of this, we developed a safety index (SI) for quantifying and analyzing individual postal motorcyclists’ safety performance based on their driving behavior and work environment. Each postman’s work environment varies from post office to post office and postman to postman depending on delivery conditions. After creating a GPS based system that can be installed on personal digital assistants (PDAs) that are already used by postmen throughout their shifts, we conducted two phases of field tests during a two-year period involving postmen working in different demographic areas. Using the collected field data, we validated our developed SI and analyzed whether there were any differences in the safety performance among postal motorcyclists working in different regional post offices or within the same regional post office. We found that the safety performance of postal motorcyclists working in different regional delivery offices varied depending on the regional characteristics of the local delivery office (e.g., densely distributed delivery points vs. loosely distributed delivery points). We also found that the safety performance of postal motorcyclists working in the same regional post office varied depending on the specific circumstances of each delivery area (e.g., short commuting routes of the postman responsible for downtown vs. long commuting routes of the postman responsible for a suburb).
Highlights
Motorcycle crashes represent one of the major types of road accidents
In Australia, a national study conducted by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) found that motorcyclists are 30 times more likely to die on Australian roads than car drivers [3]
The UK Department of Transport reported that motorcyclists are roughly 38 times more likely to be killed in an accident than car drivers [4]
Summary
Motorcycle crashes represent one of the major types of road accidents. Statistics reveal that motorcyclists are among the drivers most vulnerable to road accidents [1]. The system is installed on personal digital assistants (PDAs) already being carried by postmen throughout their entire shifts The use of this existing device does not require the purchasing or developing any additional equipment and reduces cost and time for the system to be used in field work. The SI developed in our study quantitatively measures the relative safety performance of a postman driving a motorcycle. To compute the SI in order to measure the relative safety level of postmen operating motorcycles, we consider an individual postal motorcyclist’s driving behavior along with his/her work environment. Using the collected field data, we show the possible applications of our developed SI, such as identifying whether there are any differences in the safety performance among postal motorcyclists working in different regional post offices or within the same regional post office.
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