Municipal contractor Biffa is mounting a new awareness campaign to reduce the number of incidents of ‘poor and dangerous’ driving around its collection vehicles and crews.
According to Biffa, some drivers mount the pavement to get around waste collection vehicles, endangering the lives of the operatives and other pedestrians.
Indeed, in 2013, Biffa’s municipal division, which services nearly 40 local authorities across Britain, recorded over 700 incidents of cars being driven on pavements, and several occasions where staff were hit by vehicles.
As such, starting this month, all of Biffa’s 200 collection staff in the Wirral will be wearing new high-visibility yellow vests overprinted with the slogan ‘Cars stay off pavements. We are only doing our job’ to raise awareness of the problem.
Biffa’s collection vehicles will also sport two new bold slogans: “The safety of our staff is important: you will be reported to the police if you put them in danger’ and ‘Please drive carefully around this vehicle’.
Biffa Business Manager Gary Robinson said there were 13 reported incidents of cars being driven on Wirral pavements to get around collection crews in the past year, with three drivers reported to the police.
He explained: “One such incident involved a manager from Wirral Council who was participating in a ‘back to the floor’ day on one of our collection vehicles. A car mounted the pavement and nearly ran him over. We didn’t hesitate to report that to the police.
He added: “Every near-miss, as we call them, is a brush with death. It’s really not acceptable for impatient drivers to drive recklessly around our vehicles and crews. My teams are only doing the job that residents want them to do, and it’s tough enough without having to worry about bad driving.”
The campaign follows on from a similar awareness-drive run by Biffa, the local authority, and Merseyside Police last summer.
That campaign asked drivers to be ‘patient, tolerant and safe’ when they encountered Biffa staff and their vehicles, and set upa protocol for Biffa to report incidents of dangerous driving to the police for possible action and prosecution.
Find out more about Biffa.
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