ABSTRACT
When one thinks of occupational injury, the mind’s eye immediately conjures up a picture of accidents in the workplace. Typically, our vision encompasses a major event, usually located in an industry where the principal form of work involves considerable physical effort. A worker is lying stunned or unconscious on the ground having suffered severe trauma to a major body part. Emergency services are rendering aid and an investigation into the event is already in its beginning stages. A more contemporary vision of occupational injury might be set in the open-plan office. This time we see a worker not suffering from an acute injury but the victim of some form of repetitive strain trauma which makes continued computer-based data-entry work insupportable. Each of these visions is a valid view of the problems we try to address and solve. However, in this chapter, we want to put a third vision forward. This vision is framed in no single physical workplace, the worker is not amenable to even a general form of stereotyping and the work is itself highly diverse. The one constant across these situations is transportation. Since transportation workers occupy a mobile and frequently dangerous workplace, it is not difficult to envisage injuries as major concerns. Transportation injuries represent a significant and growing proportion of all occupational injuries. Furthermore, accidents that are confined to a specified workplace rarely affect nonworkers or bystanders. In contrast, transportation-related accidents frequently affect individuals beyond the involved workers themselves. In consequence, transportation accidents can often have a much higher public profile. It is for these reasons that we want to consider the causes of transportation accidents and the technologies that are emerging which promise to alleviate their occurrence or at least mitigate their more harmful effects. To accomplish this, we are going to focus on one specific area of research with which we have direct familiarity, namely timeto-contact (Caird and Hancock, 1994; Manser and Hancock, 1996).
