Cyclist & Driver Safety A Top Priority For Simply Waste
An incident between one of its vehicles and a cyclist reinforced the decision by waste management company Simply Waste Solutions to fit its entire fleet of refuse vehicles with the latest hard disk recording camera equipment and cyclist safety technology.
James Capel, CEO & Founder, Simply Waste Solutions said:
“Our vehicles operate in the Greater London area and we are all aware of the situation in London regarding cyclists and the risk of fatalities. Therefore, we had been looking at different kinds of safety devices for some time. Then we had an incident where a cyclist, travelling the wrong way down a road, turned and collided into one of our vehicles. Luckily the cyclist was OK and our vehicle had been fitted with 360-degree cameras so the whole incident was recorded. Had this not been the case the driver may have blamed himself or been subjected to further investigations.”
“From this point on we stepped up our search to find the best possible safety solution to protect not only the public and vulnerable road users, but also to protect our drivers from the trauma of being involved in collisions.”
Simply Waste Solutions carried out comprehensive trials of all the market leading equipment before making a final decision to choose the RX3 Hard Disk Recording system and Cyclear detection device from Innovative Safety Systems Ltd (ISS).
James Capel continued: “We tried a range of camera systems but we found the quality of footage just wasn’t as good as the ISS equipment. Another great feature is that we can download the footage automatically and remotely by WiFi as the vehicles return to our depot so we don’t have to send someone out to retrieve the hard-drive out of the cab. It’s a seamless process.
“We also receive a daily diagnostic report so we know if every camera is functioning properly. With the other systems we would find out too late, such as when we were trying to download specific footage, that a camera was out.”
A deciding factor for choosing Cyclear was the lack of false alarming, which is a common fault with other systems and causes drivers to ignore the warning signal.
Gavin Thoday, Director, ISS, said: “The problem with other cyclist sensor systems is that they pick up street furniture, vehicles, railings and sound an alarm. It’s distracting for drivers and in the end they ignore it. Cyclear sensors filter out any objects that aren’t moving from the rear to the front of the vehicle.”
Currently FORS (Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme) Bronze accredited, Simply Waste Solutions is aiming, with the help of the equipment from ISS, to achieve silver accreditation in 2017 and gold in 2018.