Slips and trips are the most ordinary injuries in a transport business and the most expensive per shrug: the twisted ankle off the dock edge, the fall over the strap left in the walkway, the winter slip crossing the yard with arms full of parcels. HSE’s own framing is that preventing these accidents is often simple and cost-effective - the hard part is doing it while the operation runs at full tilt.
Most trips are caused by obstructions in walkways; the rest by uneven surfaces. HSE’s trip potential triangle says you need all three corners right:
Walkways. Are they in the right place, are they being used, are they available for use? A marked pedestrian route that crosses the shunting path, or that everyone shortcuts because it adds forty steps, is a walkway in name only. And consider the task on the walkway: the driver carrying a stack of parcels cannot see their own feet - is the task itself hiding the floor?
Housekeeping. A walkway is not enough; it must be kept clear. No trailing wires, no obstructions, no build-up of shrink wrap and banding. HSE’s phrase for the required culture is “a see it, sort it attitude” - from everyone, not just the cleaners. And look at the cleaning regime itself: is it effective, and are there enough bins and storage to make clear floors possible at peak?
Design and maintenance. Is the floor suitable for the environment, fitted correctly, properly maintained? Walkways wide enough and level, stairs with consistent risers, highlighted nosings where needed, usable handrails. Lighting lives here too - people cannot avoid hazards they cannot see - along with the distractions that stop them looking.
Slip accidents have their own logic - the slip potential model - but the practical drivers are familiar: contamination on the floor (water, oil, the diesel sheen around the pumps), the wrong footwear for the surface, and rushing. The depot version of contamination is constant: rain walked in at the goods-in door, meltwater under a trailer that has just come off the road, oil near the workshop entrance. The control is the same triangle thinking applied to wet surfaces: the right flooring, fast response to contamination, and routes that keep pedestrians out of the wet zones where vehicles drip.
The outdoor half of the operation gets the same duties with worse materials. Yards ice over, drainage ponds, painted markings turn slick, and the walk from the parking row to the office is a slip route every wet morning. Gritting, drainage maintenance and sensible route planning are the yard’s housekeeping.
Transport adds two slip-and-trip environments ordinary warehouses never see. The dock edge itself - the gap between bay and trailer bed, plates that flex, heights that vary by vehicle - concentrates the worst trip physics in the building into one working zone. And the vehicle: drivers climb in and out of cabs dozens of times a shift, on steps that ice in winter and slick in rain, often carrying paperwork or a phone. The triangle still applies: maintained steps and handholds are design and maintenance; clear footwells and trailer beds are housekeeping; the route from cab to dock is the walkway. None of it is specialist knowledge - it is the same three corners, applied where the work actually happens.
One more habit separates operations that improve from those that repeat: treating near-misses as data. The stumble that caught itself, the patch of diesel someone danced around - reported and fixed, they are free lessons; unreported, they are rehearsals for the injury. The “see it, sort it” culture only works when reporting is met with a mop and a repair, not an eye-roll.
The triangle’s quiet message is that most of this costs almost nothing: relocation of a bin, a housekeeping habit, a repaired riser. The expensive version is the injury, the absence, and the claim.
Floors are only half the physics; the other half is what meets them. Sensible footwear rules for the yard and warehouse, and task design that stops people carrying loads they cannot see past, address the person side of the slip model the way flooring and housekeeping address the floor side. Neither half works alone.