Page 18 - OHS, October 2021

TRAINING: MATERIALS HANDLING
may not be as much of a certainty as some may think. Perhaps the most famous example is the autobahn, Germany’s superhighway and one of the world’s few motorways without a universal speed limit. When you peek under the hood, the autobahn highway reveals some fundamental truths about the dangers of rushing and the structural nature of safety, especially when it comes to material handling.
The Start of the Autobahn
The autobahn is a system of highways not dissimilar to interstate highways in the United States. It is almost as old too, with the construction planning on the German highway system beginning in the 1920s. Despite a common misperception, the autobahn does have speed limits but that was not always the case.
In the early 1950s, the West German government removed speed limits on all roads, including: highways, city streets and everything in between. This was a short-lived experiment and, after five years, the sharp increase in traffic collisions led to a return of speed limits in urban areas. As any safety expert will tell you, let people do what they want with no restrictions and incidents are bound to pile up. Still, while speed limits were reintroduced in many areas, the autobahn remained free of speed limits.
Well, almost free of speed limits. These days, nearly one third of the autobahn has some sort of restriction on how fast you can drive. In some cases, it is because a stretch of highway passes by a city or a construction zone. In other instances, speed limits may temporarily take effect because of inclement weather and other poor driving conditions.
However, on 70 percent of the highway, you can drive as fast as you want. Some people do, with 15 percent of cars traveling over 170 km/h (105 mph). It is worth noting that there is a recommended top travel speed of 130 km/h (about 80 mph).
Drivers seem to stick relatively close to that suggested speed, as one study found, the average speed of cars to be just under 142 km/h or about seven mph over the advisory speed limit.
What do a bunch of German citizens zooming around on a highway have to do with material handling safety? Before we get into that, there is one more thing you should know about the autobahn: on a per capita basis, almost twice as many Americans die on our motorways as Germans die on theirs. Clearly, the differences in highway engineering and rules of the road—plus uncontrollable factors like the weather—lead to vastly disparate driving outcomes. Or to put it a different way: system and environmental design matter for safety.
System and Environmental Design Equals Safety
In the context of workplace safety, most EHS folks think of rushing as people moving and acting quickly—setting down a hand truck too quickly and toppling the load or moving so fast that someone does not notice that his/her hand is about to be cut with a boxcutter. Yes, those are both examples of rushing, but they don’t tell the whole story. As the autobahn demonstrates, you can move at incredibly high speeds and the incident rate can still be low.
When it comes to rushing, whether you are driving a hatchback or a pallet truck, the issue is not speed as much as comfort and ability. The only people who travel at blazing speeds on the autobahn are drivers who feel comfortable and capable of doing so. It is worth emphasizing here that higher speeds are correlated with greater severity in outcome if an incident occurs, so even if those drivers are not more likely to crash—and higher speeds do reduce reaction time—they will still be more likely to be killed or seriously injured if they do. Yes, speed kills. However, it is not the only factor involved, and it may not even be the biggest factor.
In the workplace, many material handlers work both quickly and safely. These tend to be more experienced workers with the
18 Occupational Health & Safety | OCTOBER 2021
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