You Better Watch Out

With the holidays here, my granddaughter has been singing many traditional holiday songs like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Being three years old, she is often told to “turn her listening ears on.”

To me, she’s a typical three-year-old and I can only imagine what she’s thinking when she’s told this, and then her wondering if Santa really sees her when she is sleeping and knows when she has been naughty or nice.

While the song is a message to little ones to try and be on their best behavior, the lyrics of “you better watch out” was a clear message from the results from TRAA’s collaborated research project with the University of Alabama and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety titled: “Developing a Near-Miss Reporting System for Roadside Responders.”

According to TRAA, the goal of the project was to: “recognize the challenges, barriers and opportunities for developing a fully adopted near-miss incident reporting system for all roadside responders. Only with complete and accurate data can we maximize efforts to protect roadside responders.”

 Here are some key findings of the project:

• Nearly 30% of towing industry respondents reported encountering near-miss incidents daily.
• While 85% of respondents believe reporting near-miss incidents can improve safety practices, over 40% of towing respondents reported not receiving any incident reporting training.
• More than 40% of respondents from towing and law enforcement perceive near-miss incidents as a routine part of their job.
• Respondents from towing agencies shared concerns about reporting, including potential insurance impacts, legal consequences, as well as the burden of completing reports.

The findings from the collaboration project are important as I know personally the heart-stopping stories of tow operators and near-misses; most often a gut-instinct or reaction saved their life. Tow operators, while working on the roadside, better watch out. Let’s not add to the percentage of towers encountering near-miss incidents.