Nigel Grainger brings together a related set of skills that all fleets require, to greater or lesser
degrees, but which may not have the staffing or the skills to fulfil those needs.
Bringing his wealth of experience in all areas of fleet management he offers a bespoke service through his company Fleet Risk Consultants, providing you with a cost effective fleet that complies fully with your 'duty of care' requirements.Are the Roads Really Dangerous?
There has been much talk this week about road deaths and dangerous roads, the politicians have been grandstanding in front of the press about the need to make the roads safer. There should always be proper investigation into every road death and the lessons should always be learnt, but to say a road is dangerous is, in my opinion, rather foolish.
I have yet to find a stretch of tarmac that has on its own hurt anyone, but I am being very simplistic there so I shall expand on it a little. The danger is the way in which we (drivers) use the roads, not the roads themselves.
The golden rule when driving is ‘drive at a speed which allows you to stop within the distance you can see to be clear’. If you follow this rule you cannot go far wrong, but how many of us can honestly say that we always do. The majority of roads in the UK have evolved over time from footpaths, to cart tracks, to metalled roads into the highways of today. This means that they follow the original routes around features and up and down hills.
When we used a horse and cart we were travelling at a speed that both allowed us to stop and if we hit anything it was unlikely to hurt, but now we have vehicles that are capable fo travelling at a speed in excess of 200mph on those self-same routes we used our carts on just over a hundred years ago.
But lowering the speed limit may not be the solution either, in Nottinghamshire the council have reduced the speed limits on a vast number of roads from the National Speed Limit to 50 mph. In a head-on crash all this has done is reduce the legal maximum impact velocity from 120mph to 100mph, which is unlikely to make a huge amount of difference. The really silly thing is that the minor roads are being left at National Speed Limit with half the visibility and width. It also relies on the drivers obeying this new speed limit, which the reckless ones are likely to ignore.
It only takes a momentary lapse in concentration to have a serious collision and a lifetime of hard work to avoid them.
Nigel Grainger
Senior Consultant