On-site traffic management

You can identify potential hazards by:

• observing the workplace to identify areas where pedestrians and vehicles interact. Think about:
  • the floorplan
  • if work is done close to public areas
  • when traffic volumes are higher
  • where potential blind spots are
  • areas of poor visibility.
• asking your workers, pedestrians and visiting drivers about traffic-management problems they’re aware of
• reviewing your incident and injury records including near misses.

Safe Work Australia has a useful checklist for identifying traffic hazards.

When you’ve identified risks, consider:

• how likely it is that they’ll cause harm
• how serious the harm could be.

This will help you determine what you must do to control the risk and how urgently you have to do it.

Most vehicle incidents at the workplace are from collisions between pedestrians and vehicles that are reversing, loading, or unloading. It’s important to control this risk by keeping people, including customers and visitors, away from vehicles as much as possible.

The traffic management self-assessment tool (PDF, 0.36 MB) will help you identify and assess risks and develop a traffic management plan to control them.

Work health and safety laws require a business or undertaking to do all that is reasonably practicable to eliminate or minimise risks. Ways to control risks are ranked from the highest level of protection and reliability, to the lowest. This ranking is known as the hierarchy of risk control. You must work through this hierarchy to manage risks.

Completely remove hazards, if possible

If possible, completely remove hazards from the workplace. For example, physically separate pedestrian routes from vehicle areas. You could do this by:

• using physical barriers or overhead walkways, or
• only using machinery and vehicles when no pedestrians are around.

Minimise risks

If it’s not reasonably practicable to completely eliminate the risk, consider one or more of the following options, in the order they appear below, to minimise risks:

• substitute the hazard for something safer, for example, replace forklifts with other load-shifting equipment like a walker stacker or pallet jacks
• isolate the hazard from people, for example, create a delivery area away from other pedestrians or work activities
• use engineering controls, for example, speed limiters on forklifts, presence-sensing devices, or interlocked gates.

If the above control measures do not remove the risk, consider the following controls, in the order below, to minimise the remaining risk:

• use administrative controls, for example, warning signs, or schedule delivery times to avoid or reduce the need for pedestrians and vehicles to interact
• use personal protective equipment (PPE), for example, high-visibility clothing.

Refer to Safe Work Australia’s traffic management guide for detailed information on how to control traffic risks.

Regularly review your control measures to make sure they’re working as planned and are effective. Take account of any changes and of the nature and duration of work.

Further information on the risk management process is in the How to manage work health and safety risks code of practice 2021 (PDF, 0.65 MB).