Road Safety

Heavy Vehicles and Poor Visibility

Truck visibility is a very real problem.

Studies show that road users often have difficulty clearly seeing heavy vehicles. They have trouble judging the distance between their vehicle and a truck and a truck's relative speed, especially at night or under poor weather conditions.

It is under circumstances such as these that rear-end and right-angle collisions between an automobile and a truck occur most often. One in four accidents involving a heavy vehicle can be attributed to poor visibility.

According to recent road safety records, the use of reflective bands (French only) on heavy vehicles could protect an estimated 200 individuals each year from injury or death in a highway crash. Study after study shows that reflective bands could reduce the number of rear-end and right-angle collisions by 15%.