Following on from Women in Trucking Australia’s (WiTA) hugely successful award-winning 2020 safety campaign, the organisation have once again stepped up to produce a world-first Christmas road safety campaign, Will YOU Be Next? – again fronted by female heavy vehicle drivers.
The campaign was funded by the Commonwealth Government through the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator’s (NHVR) Heavy Vehicle Safety Initiative.
The campaign will be run in the lead-up to the Christmas rush, amid the flurry of borders opening, the nation’s drivers are taking to the roads and the numbers of heavy vehicles increases significantly to meet festive season demands.
WiTA CEO Lyndal Denny says the goal of the campaign is simple – to educate motorists on how to share the roads safely with trucks – the end game being to save lives.
“Each advertisement directs viewing audiences to the WiTA website and a series of safe driving round heavy vehicle tips – all contributed by the nation’s truckies,” said Denny.
All the women in the advertisements are road train drivers and discuss their experiences on the nation’s roads, with one story raising an alarming statistic that in 80 percent of multiple vehicle crashes, truck drivers are not at fault.
Candice is Australia’s only profoundly deaf female road train driver and communicates using Auslan, while Jess, following in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother, is a third generation female road train driver.
Stefanie was nine months pregnant and a passenger in a truck that crashed and took the life of her partner. Natalie is a Paramedic who now drives 60m (12 car lengths) long iron-ore super quads.
Kelly is a paddock-runner, driving across the Nullarbor fro Adelaide to Perth each week and Lyndal drives triple road trains transporting wine from the Barossa to the Adelaide Harbour.
The Will YOU Be Next? report also details one family’s journey in the wake of a catastrophic head-on involving two heavy vehicles that ended the lives of both truckies. Milly’s Story tells of the devastating loss of her husband Brenden on the Sturt Highway in a thick dust storm in 2019, when a motorist stopped on the road in an intense dust storm to call 000.
Milly has shared her story in the hope that it will not only encourage motorists to be more situationally aware – but also to think about the potentially catastrophic consequences of poor on-road decision making.
All advertisements can be viewed here.