NSW to lobby Feds for better quad bike safety

The Quad Bike Workplace Safety Survey, carried out by a team from the University of NSW Transport and Road Safety Centre, also showed riders aged 70 years or older had double the risk of injury compared with young adult riders, and mustering livestock on farms was identified as a particularly high risk activity.

Rollover devices – while having no bearing on the number of crashes – appeared to reduce serious chest injuries and were not linked to any fatalities. 

The survey involved 1546 volunteer Australian and New Zealand individual workplace riders, as well as from workers using 321 fleet vehicles with protective devices attached.

The research was undertaken in response to a recommendation by NSW Deputy State Coroner Sharon Freund in 2015 that a survey be carried out to assess the benefits, risks and general efficacy of these rollbar-type Operator Protective Devices.

There have been 114 deaths from quad bike incidents across Australia since 2011, with NSW accounting for 32, or more than a quarter. 

In April government doubled the available rebates for protection devices, side-by-side vehicles and helmets, and more recently scrapped training costs completely.

Minister for Better Regulation Matt Kean said NSW would be writing to the Federal Employment Minister Michaelia Cash “to seek a meeting, to discuss what else can be done to save lives.”

The outcomes of the new survey study confirmed UNSW researchers’ assessment in their previous study, reported in 2015, where they concluded that protective devices were likely to be beneficial and unlikely to be injurious, although the evidence at the time was unclear.

However, the researchers emphasised that Protective Devices do not reduce the incidents of rollover and that riders in the workplace should consider using the most suitable and safest vehicle for the task or circumstances.

Team leader, UNSW Professor Raphael Grzebieta, and team member, Adjunct Associate Professor George Rechnitzer, said a case study was also carried out on a quad bike tour company that services about 25,000 patrons annually with a fleet of 100 quad bikes.

“Our study is the largest carried out to date on workplace experiences of quad bike riders with regard to their use of protective devices and quad bike specific helmets in Australia, and also includes results from New Zealand,” Professor Grzebieta said.

“It is also the first to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of protective devices in the field and to assess whether their use has resulted in serious chest injury or asphyxiation to riders.”

A previous study by the UNSW team of quad-bike crashes in the workplace resulting in fatalities found that two out of every three deaths resulted from a rollover, with half of these riders suffering asphyxiation from the vehicle resting on top of them.

The new survey finding that 67 per cent of reported crashes involved a rollover is consistent with these previous findings.

“This strong evidence confirms that quad bikes have a very small margin of tolerance for rider error,” said Professor Grzebieta.

“This is because the narrow track width of quad bikes results in a high propensity to rollover, and they are driven on irregular, often very bumpy, terrain conditions such as farms.

“This must be addressed by the manufacturers if we are to make these vehicles safer in these workplaces.”

Five riders in the survey attributed an injury they received to a protective device.

However, an analysis of all of the in-field data showed there were no cases of serious chest or head injury involving either a Quadbar or Lifeguard in a rollover crash.

“Significantly, there have not been any fatalities identified in this study or elsewhere where these protective devices caused a fatal injury,” Professor Grzebieta said.

On the other hand, 55 people were hospitalised, with 24 receiving serious chest injuries, in the rollover crashes where the quad bike had no protective device fitted.

As expected from research on the benefits of helmet use in other transport domains, the study found that quad bike specific helmets appeared to reduce the incidence of head injuries.

The research team from UNSW also included Professor Ann Williamson, Dr Soufiane Boufous, Keith Simmons and David Hicks.

Despite the survey providing a considerable amount of new information, the researchers concluded that, from a statistical viewpoint, more in-field data is still needed.

“The relatively low numbers of injuries reported in our survey for quad bikes fitted with protective devices and for riders with helmets is a good thing and may be an indicator that protective devices and helmets respectively are reducing serious chest and head injuries,” said Professor Grzebieta.

“But we would like to see a further reduction in quad bike related injuries, and preferably their elimination altogether.”

Key findings from the UNSW project:

This project was funded by SafeWork NSW.