Dave Tilton: Parallaxx Traffic Control Training Chief Executive on new road cone tipline

Significant changes at WorkSafe as it moves from an enforcement focus and launches the road cone hotline.

The agency will now engage early to support risk management, starting with today's opening of a tipline for excessive road cone usage. 

Parallaxx Traffic Control Training Chief Executive Dave Tilton told Ryan Bridge there are good elements to this announcement.
  
He agrees with the collaborative risk-based approach, connecting WorkSafe, councils, and NZTA. 

But Tilton says there are incompatible components to the hotline itself. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The government's shaking up work Safe. They want to essentially
shift its focus from being an ambulance at the bottom
of the hell to engaging and supporting businesses to manage
risk and remember the road Cone hotline while that's being
hotly and officially launched today. Dave Tilton is the Parallax
CEO Traffic Control Training. Dave, good morning to you. Does

(00:22):
this sound all like a bit of nothing to you?
What do you make of this announcement?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
I think there's there's pockets of good signals here. I
think I certainly support the collaborative intent, very much agree
with the connection there between Work Safe and councils and EDGTA.
When it comes to rolling out the risk based approach
to TTUM, I think that's definitely a direction we need
to go in. But there's also probably some incompatible components,

(00:48):
particularly with the Rotne hotline itself.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
What's that? What's the problem with the hot line?

Speaker 2 (00:55):
I think I suppose we need a list in the
capability across the industry with respect to TTM, and a
hotline really risks increasing the divide, I think between public
behavior and how contractors respond to that. My concern really
is that the engaging the public to report that all
those perceived errants road cones, if you like, kind of
creates a culture of disrespect for roadworks. So public sentiment

(01:18):
respect it's really crucial for how effective these worksites are, right,
So if that eroads, then the risk is that more
tt measures are needed to try and engineer the safe
environment to get the work done that I suppose my
concern what do.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
You think the percentage approval rating of your average road
come would be? Right now?

Speaker 2 (01:37):
I've actually asked this question in a bunch of workshops,
and it's somewhat hard to remember that the TTM sectors
lived with a very prescriptive standard for the last couple
of decades. So that's primarily what people make decisions about
or using that to make decisions and how they construct
their work zones at the moment. So there is a
degree of waste, absolutely, It's just it takes a bit
of time for that culture shift to show up.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
David, can you just tell me why when you go
on to a very quiet, cold de Sack Street, if
somebody is fixing a drain or doing a tiny bit
of work, that you could just put a couple of
road cones around and people can use their own assessments.
They need traffic management, they need lights, and they need
people like it just seems absurd.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Sorry. It comes back to how people make decisions about
how many measures they need, and if it's based on
this prescriptive standard it's not this kind of one size
fits all, then you end up with a mismatch, certainly
in the environments where the risk might be lower. What
we really want is people to do a really deliberate
and considered specific risk assessments for that environment. And that's
not really been the situation or the structure of the

(02:42):
system historically.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Okay, all right, I really appreciate your times wanting Dave
don't thank you very much. That is Dave Tilton. He's
the Parallax CEO of Traffic Control Training Organization. For more
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