Development of a safety index to identify differences in safety performance by postal delivery motorcyclists based either in different regional post offices or within the same regional office

Abstract

Postal motorcyclists who regularly conduct deliveries are particularly vulnerable to road accidents since they are exposed to traffic throughout their work day. To reduce accident rates, safety officers in each of the local delivery offices alert postmen of any hazardous conditions that may be conducive to accidents. Although some commercial postal organizations already use tracking technologies (e.g., GPS), Korea Post currently has no systematic way to collect their postmen’s driving behavior except by referring to each postman’s manually recorded daily mileage. In light of this, we developed a safety index (SI) for quantifying and analyzing individual postal motorcyclists’ safety performance based on their driving behavior and work environment. Each postman’s work environment varies from post office to post office and postman to postman depending on delivery conditions. After creating a GPS based system that can be installed on personal digital assistants (PDAs) that are already used by postmen throughout their shifts, we conducted two phases of field tests during a two-year period involving postmen working in different demographic areas. Using the collected field data, we validated our developed SI and analyzed whether there were any differences in the safety performance among postal motorcyclists working in different regional post offices or within the same regional post office. We found that the safety performance of postal motorcyclists working in different regional delivery offices varied depending on the regional characteristics of the local delivery office (e.g., densely distributed delivery points vs. loosely distributed delivery points). We also found that the safety performance of postal motorcyclists working in the same regional post office varied depending on the specific circumstances of each delivery area (e.g., short commuting routes of the postman responsible for downtown vs. long commuting routes of the postman responsible for a suburb).