“You’re almost home. Don’t be almost dead.”
As the holiday season approaches, New Zealand’s largest privately owned transport company is taking the time to remind everyone on the road to step out of the “almost” mentality and ask themselves if the driving choices they are making are really worth the risk.
HW Richardson Group (HWR) is set to launch a digital driver safety campaign called Almost Dead, addressing every-day users of New Zealand roads and challenging them to consider the consequences of their careless driving justifications. The campaign has also partnered with motorsport driving legend Greg Murphy to deliver these important road safety messages.
Across its group of companies in the heavy transport, petroleum, contracting and concrete sectors, HWR has more than 1300 trucks and heavy vehicles on the roads. Every single one of those vehicles is driven by a living, breathing person – and all of them are seeing too many near misses as the result of poor driving from road users. Some end up not being near misses.
HWR CEO Anthony Jones says as one of the largest businesses in the transport industry, HWR has a part to play in keeping everyone safe on the roads – not just its own drivers.
“We know people don’t get out on the road to purposely drive badly, but however sometimes a minority choose to make poor decisions which leads to an extremely close call or worse still a catastrophic outcome”; Almost Dead is a timely reminder to really think through your driving actions and ask yourself if trying to make that gap or passing that car towing a trailer is really worth it, is that 30 seconds really worth the rest of your life.”
The Almost Dead safety campaign features the use of real-life footage from the in-cab cameras in HWR trucks. It’s a small insight into the daily experience of an HWR driver; watching drivers pass on blind corners, misjudging distances and outright dangerous driving – situations that leave all parties thinking, “that was close, almost didn’t make it”.
There are many reasons to tell oneself to be in a hurry; there’s dinner to be cooked, kids to get to sport practices, Christmas events to get ready for, things to organise before the year closes out. Ultimately, though, these daily, unchallenged thoughts pale in significance to the horror results of vehicle collisions and the mental scars of near misses.
Almost Dead calls out this poor decision making on the road and encourages people to take a step back and really think – is it worth it?
Jones says the Group’s health and safety, especially of its drivers, members of the public the company interacts with and the potential for road incidents, is never far from his mind.
“This is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. We’ve got some extremely skilled drivers in the Group who have managed to outmanoeuvre what could have been a serious crash, but only by the skin of their teeth.”
“It’s the kind of driving behaviour that no one thinks they’re guilty of until they find themselves in the middle of a dangerous situation. If you’re lucky, it almost would have been crash. If you’re not, you’re almost dead.”
Almost Dead will run continuously across HWR’s digital media platforms in the months to follow.
HWR encourages everyone on the roads to keep safe this holiday season. Kiwis have almost made it to the end of the year for a well-deserved break. Drive safely to ensure everyone gets there.
- HWR’s Almost Dead campaign can be viewed via their Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
