Cement trucks could be pace cars, extra eyes on speeders
Lafarge Canada volunteered its slow-moving concrete trucks as pace cars Friday in Edmonton’s push to reduce speeding and traffic fatalities.
But the partnership could go further, said Bruce Willmer, regional vice-president for Lafarge Canada, after addressing city councillors on traffic safety Friday. The company’s next step is to install forward and back-facing cameras in its trucks, connected to its onboard GPS.
If someone speeds dangerously past a truck equipped like that, the data could be turned over to enforcement, he said. “Those are the sorts of things we would look at, yes . ... We’ve just started talking to the city and we’ll see where it goes.”
Lafarge Canada has 60 drivers and 100 trucks in the Edmonton area navigating around sometimes unpredictable children on bikes and regular traffic. In January 2016, one was involved in a fatal pedestrian collision, killing a 49-year-old woman in a downtown Edmonton crosswalk. That wasn’t the first for Lafarge in Canada.
The company installed GPS on all its trucks in 2015, and rolled out a driver-feedback program in 2016. Now it requires drivers to roll 10 km/h under the speed limit and avoid hard braking, fast accelerating or high-speed turns.
The system gives drivers and their bosses real-time alerts to let the company coach its drivers. That gives “better fuel economy, less maintenance and less risk without affecting trip times,” said Willmer.
“What we found is that it really hasn’t affected our delivery times or cost,” said Willmer, since trucks stop often in urban situations anyway.
Willmer also asked councillors to help with an education campaign for cyclists and pedestrians. “We can do everything we can to wrap the truck in plastic, but we still need to make sure children and people crossing crosswalks understand that they’re not always seen.”
Councillors embraced the idea of working with Lafarge Canada and asked city officials to explore what that means.